[jira] [Commented] (CONFIGURATION-26) Consider returning a concatenation of the list properties with getString()

["Baris Acar (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CONFIGURATION-26?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=13435884#comment-13435884 ] 

Baris Acar commented on CONFIGURATION-26:
-----------------------------------------

Last updates on this issue were in 2007 - did anything happen?

I would argue that {{getString()}} should return the value from the property file _verbatim_ - not the first item in the list, but not concatenated either - I'm concerned concatenation could end up slightly changing the format, using the wrong delimiter, etc. (Ittay's suggestion of returning "the string representation of a List" is somewhat ambiguous - does he/she mean {{List.toString()}}? This may not be what's wanted).

What is the use case for having {{getString}} return the first item of a list anyway? I have to say as a newcomer to commons config, this is _very_ unexpected behaviour. If someone wants the first item of a list, surely they _know_ that and can just request {{config.getStringArray("foo")[0]}}, which is clear and explicit.

As it stands I don't appear to have a way to parse the following config meaningfully:
{code}
foo=hello, world! 
bar=first,second 
{code}
with foo as a string ("hello, world!") and bar as a list ({"first", "second"}).


                
> Consider returning a concatenation of the list properties with getString()
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: CONFIGURATION-26
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CONFIGURATION-26
>             Project: Commons Configuration
>          Issue Type: Bug
>            Reporter: Ittay Dror
>            Priority: Minor
>             Fix For: 2.0
>
>
> in AbstractConfiguration.resolveContainerStore (javadoc):
>   * Returns an object from the store described by the key. If the value is a
>   * List object, replace it with the first object in the list.
> but what if getProperty returns a List because this is the type of the property? 
>  this code will silently grab the first elemen. I don't understand why. Probably 
> the reason is that some class extending AbstractConfiguration returns List for 
> properties. In this case I think the better approach is to have that class 
> return the first element instead, rather than returning the List and letting 
> AbstractConfiguration (which is used by many other implementations, including 
> outside of the configuration package) handle it

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