Talk:SMILA/Documentation/2011.Simplification/Data Model and Serialization Formats

TM: I have just briefly looked @ the new DM and had some ideas/remarks which I just put down in all brevity as a bullet list. At times these are formulated rather strongly as "should be" and not as a question. So plz. be not offended and just comment on why this is not a good idea or does not work for Smila.

• TM: AnyMap should extend Map interface
• TM: AnySeq should extend List
• TM: isValue -> isContainer, isLiteral

Reason: also a Map, Seq is a Value, albeit a complex one hence isValue is not really that telling IMO

• TM: what is the distinction between Date and DateTime other than the use case? i.e. do we treat its value differently, e.g. truncate the time part in case we say asDate()
• TM: why have a Value class and not use java native objects directly? e.g. Boolean, Integer, …
• TM: Value.asXXX() I see that they throw exceptions, depending on what u want to do this is good or just bothersome.

I would also provide a version that silently returns NULL (in C# the cast operator "as" behaves like so, and I miss it sometimes in java) OR

a default value in case datatype doesn’t match – or even convert automatically.

this could be done by overloading with a parameter that takes the default value, a flag that controls return null vs. throw exception or having 2 sets of methods

• TM: Record.getMetadata() -> Record.getValueMap()

reason: sometimes we don’t have attachments at all and anly use the "meta data" which is the not just meta, e.g. in case of search

• TM: are we still going to have some Path object or smth equivalent? I kind of liked that…
• TM: Attachments, the record should always have an indicator of all attachments and tell if the attachement has been filtered out. that way we don’t need a trip to the BB and ask that.