Support declarative sub-path resolution in @Reference and @Children

[unic]

Support declarative sub-path resolution in @Reference and @Children

[SebastianLisken]

I think naming this attribute "path" would be confusing, because the annotated property contains the main part of the path. How about subPath or relPath?

[DaniRey]

I also think that a simple "path" might be confusing, although being an attribute of @reference should give it some context.
Maybe targetPath would be an option as well.

[SebastianLisken]

The problem is how to best express what is really a multi-step process: 1. from the resource modelled by the current class, navigate to a string property whose relative path is either the name of the annotated class variable or expressed by the @path annotation; 2. read the string and resolve it to a resource; 3. potentially move from that resource to a different resource whose relative path is to be named by the new attribute; 4. potentially replace the resource by its children. (Finally, adapt if desired.) Could we even want to add another move to a relative path after step 4, or exhange steps 3 and 4? Difficult to choose names that express this clearly, particularly as the name for step 1 is already fixed because it will be expressed by the @path attribute.

[olaf-otto]

My main concern is that is must be 100% clear what these settings are doing. As Sebastain correctly said, the resolution process has multiple steps and it may be unclear where an additional path segment is applied.

For the @reference annotation:
Here, the provided path is appended to all of the references. I would thus call the property "append", to signal that the path is appended to all of the references (in case of a collection) as well as any single reference:

@Reference(append = "/jcr:content")

For the @children annotation:
This is a bit more tricky. Two things must be made clear: a) The given path is resolved on every child and b) It is a relative path. I would thus call the property "resolveBelowEveryChild" to make clear that each child is affected and that the resolution is below (relative):

@Children(resolveBelowEveryChild = "/jcr:content")