[jira] [Commented] (AVRO-2940) Add velocity template overrides to maven plugin

["Ryan Skraba (Jira)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-2940?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=17222157#comment-17222157 ] 

Ryan Skraba commented on AVRO-2940:
-----------------------------------

Hello!  This sounds like a nice improvement for those who are writing their own templates (which is already a very daunting task in Java...) 

What do you think about about simply falling back to the resources packaged with the Avro compiler, even if the templateDir is specified?  I can't see anybody _wanting_ to have an error because there's a missing velocity template and that might cover your use case without having to change the templateDir from a single string to a list.

> Add velocity template overrides to maven plugin
> -----------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: AVRO-2940
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-2940
>             Project: Apache Avro
>          Issue Type: Improvement
>          Components: java
>            Reporter: Nicolas
>            Priority: Major
>
> h3. Context
> In my team, we are exploring creating java classes for our internal teams with additional customizations like adding annotations to the output java class from .avsc. To do this, we have modeled off of the maven-plugin module. 
> Ultimately we needed to create a custom record.vm template and set our own templateDirectory in the classpath of our custom wrapping jar. 
> {code:java}
> final SpecificCompiler compiler = new SpecificCompiler(protocol);
> compiler.setTemplateDir(templateDirectory); {code}
> h3. Problem 
> Even though we are only overriding a subset of the velocity templates, we are copy pasting all of the templates from the compiler module. The SpecificCompiler class can only handle a single directory and assumes we can just append
> {code:java}
> templateDir + "<template>.vm" {code}
> h3. Idea for improvement
> I am wondering if it's worth exploring having users of the compiler take a list of directories. We can use the ordering to determine the priority of the template so that users like me could provide our local directory at the head with only our overrides present. 
> For backwards compatibility, we can keep the existing setter method. The result of that is a singleton list. As part of this, we could create .addTemplateOverride() on the compiler which would prepend.



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