[UIMA-6365] Warn or fail if a primitive field is marked as a non-mandatory parameter

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Component/s: uimaFIT-Maven-Plugin
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Richard Eckart de Castilho
• Created: 19/May/21 08:59
• Updated: 11/Mar/22 10:15

Description

The mandatory flag on configuration parameters indicates if the target field accepts a null value or not. For primitive fields, this is obviously not the case. Thus, for primitive fields, mandatory must always be true and if we want to avoid that the user actually has to specify the parameter every time, the defaultValue must be set. That makes the parameter effectively optional from the user's perspective.

Probably the best place to catch this is the "generate" or "enhance" goal of the Maven plugin - which could immediately fail.

It could also be detected by uimaFIT itself at runtime, but then it would be better just to warn (maybe warn less with high frequency).