Purpose of @RooBeanInfo?

[nd-net]

After I found the @RooBeanInfo annotation, I tested it with a simple class:

@RooJavaBean
@RooToString
public class Item{
  @NotNull
  private String type;

  public String getFoo() {
    return "";
  }

  public void setFoo(String s) {
  }
}

I was expecting an auto-generated BeanInfo class, in the vein of @RooJavaBean, but that didn't happen. Digging around in the addon-beaninfo sourcecode didn't enlighten me neither.

Could I have some information about the purpose of this annotation and the corresponding Roo plugin?

Cheers, Andreas

[Stefan Schmidt]

Hi Andreas,

The @RooJavaBean annotation will trigger the creation of a Item_Roo_JavaBean.aj file when needed. @RooJavaBean in this case could take care of creating accessors and mutators for private fields defined in the Item.java class. In your case it will create a fully working getType() and a setType() methods as per JavaBean sec.

Internally the @RooJavaBean annotation will also trigger the creation of a BeanInfoMetadata object which provides metadata information about this bean. This is more interesting for add-on development as the add-on might need to know about accessors, mutators, field names and types, etc which this bean exposes.

If you want to take a look at the BeanInfoMetadata for curiosity you can type this command in the shell:

roo> metadata for type -type your.package.Item

This command will list all available metadata for the Item type and if you look closely you will see BeanInfoMetadata among them.

I believe Ben is planning to write a blog post explaining the metadata system in a little more detail.

-Stefan