getProperty

[Ralph Johnson <rj...@gmail.com>]

I'm refactoring a class so that instead of being a subclass of Binding, it
has a variable that is a Binding.    There are a lot of different
subclasses of Binding in this system, I'm leaving most of them the same,
but I decided this one was wrong.    When used as a binding, it has a
couple of interesting named values, "Types" and "Instances".    So, there
are scripts that say "store.Types" and "store.Instances" and I could
rewrite them to be "store.binding.Types" and "store.binding.Instances", but
there are a LOT of these scripts and I am not even sure where they all
are.   If the names had been lowercase then I could have defined getTypes
and getInstances, but since they are capitalized, I don't know how to
handle them.

One possibility is to define getProperty to look for the names "Types" and
"Instances".   It would look something like this

Object getProperty(String name) {
  switch(name) {
     case 'Types': return binding['Types']
     case 'Instances': return binding['Instances']
     default: ????
  }
}

What do I put as the default action?   The problem is that it will get
called for every property, not only these fake ones.   I can't say "return
super.getProperty(name)" because it is defined at the meta-level, not in
the superclass.

Of course, if there is a simpler way to solve the problem, I would love to
hear it.

-Ralph Johnson