de.richtercloud.reflection.form.builder.retriever

Annotation Type FieldPosition

@Documented
 @Retention(value=RUNTIME)
 @Target(value={METHOD,FIELD})
public @interface FieldPosition

An annotation used to indicate the position in a ReflectionFormPanel by specifying the membership in a group with the option to specify the position within the group.

Motivation and concept

Since absolute positioning is very intransparent and requires dealing with an ever increasing set of position constants (either specified in classes or pinned to the backside of your head), it's easier to specify relative positions and groups and let a richtercloud.validation.tools.FieldRetriever make sure that everything makes sense based on validation. There might be a usecase for referencing fields which don't belong to a field group from within a field of a field group or outside, but for ease sake it's not supported, i.e. all ordering between groups takes place in FieldGroup annotations and all ordering inside groups with afterFields() and beforeFields(). If a fieldGroup() is specified afterFields() and beforeFields() have to reference fields inside the group only.

Tips

Specify group names as constants in a separate class in order to avoid undesired behaviour because of typos. FieldPositions without a fieldGroup() reference and both an empty value for afterFields() and beforeFields() are invalid because they have no use.

Author:

richter

See Also:

FieldGroups

Required Element Summary

Required Elements

Modifier and Type	Required Element and Description
String	fieldGroup A reference to the group the field belongs to.

Optional Element Summary

Optional Elements

Modifier and Type	Optional Element and Description
String[]	afterFields The list of field names which should occur before the annotated field.
String[]	beforeFields The list of field names which should occur after the annotated field.

Element Detail

fieldGroup

public abstract String fieldGroup

A reference to the group the field belongs to. It's mandatory to specify a field group (see class comment for an explanation).

Returns:

the name of the owning group

afterFields

public abstract String[] afterFields

The list of field names which should occur before the annotated field.

Returns:

the list of preceeding fields

Default:

{}

beforeFields

public abstract String[] beforeFields

The list of field names which should occur after the annotated field.

Returns:

the list of following fields

Default:

{}