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Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:18:57 -0400
Message-ID: <b90102160904161518x44c61018p2605e28afc8830fd@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: new pages
From: Andrew Jaquith <andrew.r.jaquith@gmail.com>
To: jspwiki-dev@incubator.apache.org
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Funny, I was drafting an e-mail on this very subject. Here it is...

---

As the 3.0 trunk starts to settle down, I'm headed back to the JSP
tier to do some work. I wanted to get your thoughts on
WikiPageTypeConverter -- an important component of how JSPWiki
interacts with the Stripes layer. I'm thinking of changing how it
works so that it resolves non-existent WikiPages.

Background: the Stripes TypeConverter classes are pretty nifty. They
extract parameters from the request stream and convert them into
objects the target ActionBean wants. For example, if an ActionBean has
a get/set property called "counter" and its return type is an integer,
Stripes will convert the value of the request parameter "counter"
(which is a String) into the correct integer, and cause the
ActionBean's setCounter(int) method to be called with the converted
integer value. For JSPWiki, I've created TypeConverter classes for
wiki Groups, WikiPages, and Principals. The net effect is that when
one of our ActionBeans is invoked by user's browser in an HttpRequest,
all of the parameters are magically parsed, converted into their
correct target types, and bound to the ActionBean. Once the properties
are converted and populated, they become available for an event
handler method to use.  It works like magic.

Now, the WikiPageTypeConverter I wrote is pretty interesting. When we
see a String representing the name of a WikiPage, we look it up in the
ContentManager. If it's not found, we return a null. Meaning, "we
didn't find the page because it's not in the repository." The
consequences of this is what is causing the problem. What this means
is that ActionBeans with a WikiPage property on them won't have a
WikiPage bound to them when we finally invoke the event handler
method. For example, EditActionBean's "edit" method (which starts the
editing screen) gives an NPE if we try to edit (create!) a page that
doesn't exist, because the TypeConverter looked up the page, and not
finding it, returned null as it should have.

This is clearly a problem.

There are two ways of dealing with this: (1) changing the behavior of
WikiPageTypeConverter so that it returns a valid WikiPage object
whenever it is presented with a non-null page name, even if the page
does not exist. The other solution is to (2) ensure that the
WikiActionBean that depends on the WikiPage has the correct code to
detect the non-existent page condition, and then can create a new
WikiPage to fill that gap. ViewActionBean provides an example of (2).

I think (1) is a better option because it means we fix the problem
once in WikiPageTypeConverter, and don't have to write special
handling code in every WikiPage-related ActionBean. However, I don't
fully understand how this would interact with ContentManager. Can you
create new "temporary" Nodes that aren't persisted? Do we need a
WikiPage method like isSaved() or similar to indicate whether it's
been persisted to JCR? Dunno how hard this is.

Andrew

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 5:05 PM, Janne Jalkanen
<Janne.Jalkanen@ecyrd.com> wrote:
> Heya!
>
> Could you Andrew walk me through exactly how new pages are supposed to be
> created? As far as I can tell, everything just explodes if you try to edit a
> page which does not exist, and there really isn't a place to call
> ContentManager.addPage() either, since the WikiPage gets set in
> WikiPageConverter, and non-existent page is considered an error.
>
> /Janne
>