[OGNL-3] Allow setter properties to have another return type than VOID

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 2.7
• Component/s: PropertyAccessors
• Environment: JDK 1.4 and 5
• Assignee: Jesse Kuhnert
• Reporter: Jeppe Cramon
• Created: 30/Jan/06 08:47
• Updated: 05/May/07 16:02
• Resolved: 05/May/07 16:02

Description

OGNL doesn't allow property accessor methods to have a return type other than VOID.

This is an issue for us, as we use return types to create fluent interfaces.
What I mean by this, is that our object most often have properties that look like this:

public class User {
private String userName;
private String password;

public String getPassword()

{ return password; }

public User setPassword(String password)

{ this.password = password; return this; }

public String getUserName()

{ return userName; }

public User setUserName(String userName)

{ this.userName = userName; return this; }

}

Note: The return type might now always be the same as the surrounding type (User). It depends on what kind of interface you're trying to create.

With interfaces/classes like this we can for instance write: new User().setUserName("whatever").setPassword("secret");

From a quick glance at the OGNL code, it seems that it's that it's the "findObjectIndexedPropertyDescriptors()" method in OgnlRuntime that's causing the problem.

Would you consider allowing setter property method to have a return type other than VOID?

/Jeppe