Feature: Encapsulation and collections using the Delegate annotation

[Timothy Spear]

In an ideal world, we are supposed to encapsulate collections/sets and other attributes within the object and not expose it.

Doing so requires fairly extensive boilerplate code; which is why I never bother doing it. Based on searching, I think that has come up more than once, but most of the requests I found were rather old. 

However, I have yet to see any suggestions to do tied to the Delegate annotation. 

With two (what I hope are minor) changes the existing delegate annotation could do the job. 

Add two attributes to Delegate:

1. prefix 

2. methodMap

If prefix is enabled, generate the new method name by appending the variable to the method name from the interface, following the same logic as Getter/Setter.

MethodMap would allow for name changes. e.g. I would want to standardize "add" as my public method name, and map it to "put", for example.

Tim

[Neale Upstone]

So if we're doing:

@Delegate(types=List.class)
private ArrayList<Cat> cats;

Wouldn't suffix="Cat" also be useful?

[Timothy Spear]

Neale,

Sure, a suffix using the variable name would also work.

Tim