Description Konstantin Komissarchik 2010-11-26 16:48:48 EST

DelimitedListBindingImpl provides an easy way to implement lists which are backed by a delimited string, but it currently provides no way to handle a more complex use cases where the extracted string tokens should map to more than one property.

Consider the following string:

abc:3.5;foo:4.3;xyz:1.2

The list delimiter is ';', which gives us a list of model elements composed around "abc:3.5", "foo:4.3" and "zyz:1.2" strings. No suppose we wanted to further break up those strings on ':' and access those parts via two separate properties. The DelimitedListBindingImpl API does not allow that because it is impossible to provide a customized implementation of the resource constructed for list entries.

Proposed API changes:

1. Rename DelimitedListBindingImpl.Entry to DelimitedListBindingImpl.ListEntryResource and make that class public and abstract.

2. Factor out code that makes single-property assumptions into a separate DefaultListEntryResource class. This class can remain private.

3. Add new protected method DelimitedListBindingImpl.createListEntryResource() which should return DefaultListEntryResource by default, but can be overridden to supply a custom implementation for ListEntryResource.