[Yanel-dev] Moving toward the node based repository interface

[Andreas Wuest]

Hi

Here's a short summary of what we've discussed today with regard to the 
node based repository interface.

In the long and medium term, we would like to move to a node interface 
which contains typed properties (we already have that), and a default 
property (which we don't have yet). On those properties, getType() can 
be called to enquire for the property's type. If the type is e.g. 
binary, then getInputStream() should be called to retrieve its value, if 
the type is character, then getReader(), etc.

The default property marks one of the properties as kind of "main". A 
node would also implement the Property interface, whose methods would be 
used as a shortcut to access the node's default property.

When creating new nodes, not only should the creation method be 
parametrised with the distinction between collection and resource, but 
also with the content type (in case it is a resource). Subsequently, the 
correct method should be called to set the content of the default 
property, e.g. getOutputStream() for binary resources, getWriter() for 
character resources, etc.

Since this would require some refactoring, we decided to just implement 
an isBinary() method on the node, in order to be able to decide if 
getInputStream() or getReader() should be called to read the content's 
of the resource. The downside of this is that we can only distinguish 
between character data and binary data, and therefore lose type 
information, if the repo back-end had provided some (e.g. using an SQL 
resource, whose values sport much finer-grained type information than 
only character and binary).

-- 
Kind regards,
Andi