Adding tags dynamically

[janschaefer]

It might sometimes be useful to add tags dynamically to scenarios

[Airblader]

What should this look like from a design point of view? Do you want a method which takes a TagConfiguration?

[janschaefer]

I haven't really thought about that. I am not sure whether TagConfiguration is the right thing to use here. The TagConfiguration class is actually used to configure a tag. For applying a tag there should be a more narrow interface. In fact, it should only take the class of the annotation and and optional value, IMO.

[Airblader]

This could be more challenging than I originally anticipated. We need an actual instance of the annotation, not just its class, because we need to pass some instance to the DescriptionGenerator and HrefGenerator if they are being used.

However, creating a proper instance of an annotation isn't exactly easy. For example, Hibernate has this proxy class for that problem.

There's three obvious (and maybe other, non-obvious) ways out:

• Pass null to the generators for the annotation instance and document this. Since it's only the case for a new feature, it's a backwards-compatible change. It also somewhat makes sense not to have an instance of the annotation in case of dynamically added tags since there is no annotation.
• Disallow (i.e., either do not execute or throw an exception) generators for dynamically added tags. I'm not a fan of this because it's rather unexpected behavior. Even if documented.
• Implement an annotation proxy similar to Hibernate. I really don't like this because it's a lot of bloat.

[Airblader]

On a side note, could it be that there's a bug in ScenarioModelBuilder#toTags? The method exits early if ignoreValue is set. Both nested tags and the href attribute won't be set in this case, neither of which sounds right to me. Bug?