Monday, March 5, 2007

Rails does not like slaves

I played with Ruby on Rails today and found that it can't convert slave to it's plural form slaves.
It automatically changes letter v to f in slave word and f to v in slafe word.

That was funny!

Thursday, March 1, 2007

Get rid of your nested if operators!

Every one of you know how it is disappointing that you can not use
switch
operators with strings, doubles, your custom objects, etc. But anyway sometimes it is possible to get rid of your nested ifs if you will use static maps. Let us consider an example: here we need to set JavaBean properties of certain types:

protected static Object fillTestBean(Object bean) throws InvocationTargetException, IllegalArgumentException, IllegalAccessException {
Method[] methods = bean.getClass().getMethods();

for (Method method : methods) {
if (RTTIUtils.isSetter(method)) {
Class type = RTTIUtils.getSetterType(method);
if (type == String.class)
RTTIUtils.invokeSetter(bean, method, testStr);
else if (type == boolean.class)
RTTIUtils.invokeSetter(bean, method, testBoolean);
else if (type == byte.class)
RTTIUtils.invokeSetter(bean, method, testByte);
else if (type == char.class)
RTTIUtils.invokeSetter(bean, method, testChar);
else if (type == short.class)
RTTIUtils.invokeSetter(bean, method, testShort);
else if (type == int.class)
RTTIUtils.invokeSetter(bean, method, testInt);
else if (type == long.class)
RTTIUtils.invokeSetter(bean, method, testLong);
else if (type == float.class)
RTTIUtils.invokeSetter(bean, method, testFloat);
else if (type == double.class)
RTTIUtils.invokeSetter(bean, method, testDouble);
else if (type == Boolean.class)
RTTIUtils.invokeSetter(bean, method, testBooleanObj);
else if (type == Byte.class)
RTTIUtils.invokeSetter(bean, method, testByteObj);
else if (type == Character.class)
RTTIUtils.invokeSetter(bean, method, testCharacterObj);
else if (type == Short.class)
RTTIUtils.invokeSetter(bean, method, testShortObj);
else if (type == Integer.class)
RTTIUtils.invokeSetter(bean, method, testIntegerObj);
else if (type == Long.class)
RTTIUtils.invokeSetter(bean, method, testLongObj);
else if (type == Float.class)
RTTIUtils.invokeSetter(bean, method, testFloatObj);
else if (type == Double.class)
RTTIUtils.invokeSetter(bean, method, testDoubleObj);
else if (type == Date.class)
RTTIUtils.invokeSetter(bean, method, testDate);
}
}

return bean;
}

(here all variables starting with test are constants)
Seems really annoying to write all this ifs and, also what if we will need to check values? Another function will also need this nested ifs!
In this case I usually do the following:

private static final Map initObjects = new HashMap();
private static boolean isCosideredType(Class type) {
return initObjects.keySet().contains(type);
}
static {
initObjects.put(String.class, testStr);
initObjects.put(boolean.class, testBoolean);
initObjects.put(byte.class, testByte);
initObjects.put(char.class, testChar);
initObjects.put(short.class, testShort);
initObjects.put(int.class, testInt);
initObjects.put(long.class, testLong);
initObjects.put(float.class, testFloat);
initObjects.put(double.class, testDouble);
initObjects.put(Boolean.class, testBooleanObj);
initObjects.put(Byte.class, testByteObj);
initObjects.put(Character.class, testCharacterObj);
initObjects.put(Short.class, testShortObj);
initObjects.put(Integer.class, testIntegerObj);
initObjects.put(Long.class, testLongObj);
initObjects.put(Float.class, testFloatObj);
initObjects.put(Double.class, testDoubleObj);
initObjects.put(Date.class, testDate);
}

protected static Object fillTestBean(Object bean) throws InvocationTargetException, IllegalArgumentException, IllegalAccessException {
Method[] methods = bean.getClass().getMethods();

for (Method method : methods) {
if (RTTIUtils.isSetter(method)) {
Class type = RTTIUtils.getSetterType(method);
if (isCosideredType(type)) {
RTTIUtils.invokeSetter(bean, method, initObjects.get(type));
}
}
}

return bean;
}