What is the purpose of Dynamic Bean in ATG

Question

I've read documentation, but there is no definition of the main purpose of Dynamic Bean. I understand how to implement this but dont know why this approach so good.

So could someone tell the situation when it's good to use Dynamic Bean?

Thanks

Answer 1

The most useful part about dynamic beans in ATG is providing additional DynamicPropertyMapper classes for classes that aren't already covered by it. First, note that you can use the DynamicBeans.setPropertyValue(object, property, value) and DynamicBeans.getPropertyValue(object, property) static methods to set or get properties on an object that don't necessarily correspond with Java bean properties. If the object you're using isn't registered with dynamic beans, it'll try to use Java bean properties by default. Support is provided out of the box to do that with repository items (properties correspond to repository item properties; also applies to the Profile object, naturally), DynamoHttpServletRequest objects (correspond to servlet parameters), maps/dictionaries (correspond to keys), and DOM Node objects (correspond to element attributes followed by the getters/setters of Node).

To add more classes to this, you need to create classes that extend DynamicPropertyMapper. For instance, suppose you want to make HttpSession objects work similarly using attributes with a fallback to the getters and setters of HttpSession. Then you'd implement the three methods from DynamicPropertyMapper, and the getBeanInfo(object) class can be easily implemented using DynamicBeans.getBeanInfo(object) if you don't have any custom BeanInfo or DynamicBeanInfo classes for the object you're implementing this for.

Once you have a DynamicPropertyMapper, you can register it with DynamicBeans.registerPropertyMapper(mapper). Normally this would be put into a static initialization block for the class you're writing the property mapper for. However, if you're making a property mapper for another class out of your control (like HttpSession), you'll want to make a globally-scoped generic service that simply calls the register method in its doStartService(). Then you can add that service to your initial services.

Answer 2

Dynamic beans typically allow you to get and set fields which may not be explicit members. The most direct comparison is a map - maps allow you to get and set fields without defining them beforehand. However, a dyanamic bean conforms to standard java idioms (getters/setters).

Unlike a hashmap, however, dyanbeans can enforce constraints more readily (and they hide the underlying data structure implementation, so they can be lazy, or make data connections when being set, etc... ) . For example, you can easily add a getter or setter to your dynabean that is explicit, and the code would read very idiomatically and cleanly interact with other bean apis.

public int getCost()
{ 
    if(this.get("cost")==null)
     return -1;
    return Integer.parseInt(super.get("cost"));
}