[WW-4203] Allow disabling xwork creating null objects on a property level

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: 2.3.15.1, 2.3.15.2
• Fix Version/s: 7.0.0
• Component/s: Core Interceptors
• Labels: interceptors typeconverter xwork
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Jasper Rosenberg
• Created: 17/Sep/13 19:54
• Updated: 22/Oct/22 13:51

Description

Currently, the ParametersInterceptor sets: ReflectionContextState.setCreatingNullObjects(contextMap, true)

This is great for parameters like "person.name=Phil" since it will create the Person object for you and then set the name.

However, sometimes you have a converter for a property that will set it as a whole, and you want to make sure that an empty object is never created. For example, "person=6", where the Person is set by looking it up by id. Currently, if someone messed with the url and made it "person[x]=6", XWork would end up creating an empty Person object. (Something along these lines happened to us and I was looking for a clean way to tell XWork to not allow it)

Perhaps the TypeConversion annotation could be extended to support this as an additional flag.