Major Description
Tried to implement request processors as described in the very good FAQ entry here http://ws.apache.org/xmlrpc/faq.html#handler_initialization
It didn't work at first, and when debugging I discovered that there is a major problem here. First a handler map is loaded from a property file, and all the handlers are given default RPFFactories.
PropertyHandlerMapping mapping = super.newPropertyHandlerMapping(url);
only later is the new RPFFactory created and assigned to the map.
mapping.load(Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader(), url);
Well, this only stores it in the map, but does not modify any of the handlers the map already contains. Which makes the effort of creating and assigning a new factory to the map useless, since the factory won't be used when creating new handler instances.
The javadoc is quite useless here in determining the correct behaviour. AbstractReflectiveHandlerMapping.setRequestProcessorFactoryFactory only says "Sets the mappings RequestProcessorFactoryFactory." No word about what should happen with the handlers that are already in the map.
Since the correct behaviour is not specified there are probably many ways to fix this:
1. setRequestProcessorFactoryFactory does not update any handlers (current situation). Then specify this in the javadoc and fix the FAQ (see attached source for a (less elegant) way to accomplish the same thing).
2. setRequestProcessorFactoryFactory updates all the contained handlers.
3. The handlers never get out of sync with the map that contains them - they just don't duplicate information present in the map.