How to populate a collection from a Map?

[Andras Soltesz]

Hi All,

I am new to Dozer and haven't found info on this one:

I would like to populate an embedded collection from http request parameters with Dozer.

The request parameters  are available for me as a java.util.Map (as 'requestMap" below) and the entries look like this:

Map<String, String> requestMap (key -> value) =

- "id" -> "15"

- "title" -> "Nice article about electric cars"

- "comments[0].text" -> "comment 1"

- "comments[1].text" -> "comment 2"

The beans I would like to populate:

public class Article {

  int id;

  String title;

  List<Comment> comments;

}

public class Comment {

  String text;

}

When I use "mapper.map(requestMap, article)", the article "title" and the "id" attributes get populated from the map nicely. However, the "comments" collection does not get populated.

Is Dozer supposed to be able to populate the collection as well? What do I have to do to get it populated?

[Gareth Healy]

You'd need to use a custom converter, to map the key of a comment to an actual instance.