I have an autobean with a property that is only needed for the UI. I believe that you can null out values and the AutoBeanCodex will not serialized that property, but that equates to an extra step which is needed at serialization.
I was hoping for some annotation similar to the Editor @Ignore annotation. For example:
public interface Foo {
...
@Ignore
String getUiOnlyProperty();
}
So, other than nulling out the value at serialization time, is there any other way to keep an autobean property from being serialized?
Autobeans are meant to be a Java skin on a JSON/XML/whatever format - they aren't really designed to hold other pieces of data. That said, several thoughts that either nearly answer your question with out-of-the-box tools, or might inspire some other ideas on how to solve your problem.
You should be able to build read-only properties by omitting the setter. This isn't quite what you are asking for, but still might be handy.
Along those lines, the JavaDoc for the @PropertyName annotation seems to allude to this possible feature:
/**
* An annotation that allows inferred property names to be overridden.
* <p>
* This annotation is asymmetric, applying it to a getter will not affect the
* setter. The asymmetry allows existing users of an interface to read old
* {@link AutoBeanCodex} messages, but write new ones.
*/
Reading old messages but writing new ones seems like it might be closer to what you are after, and still allowing you to work with the thing-that-looks-like-a-bean.
The real answer though seems to be the AutoBean.setTag and getTag methods:
/**
* A tag is an arbitrary piece of external metadata to be associated with the
* wrapped value.
*
* @param tagName the tag name
* @param value the wrapped value
* @see #getTag(String)
*/
void setTag(String tagName, Object value);
...
/**
* Retrieve a tag value that was previously provided to
* {@link #setTag(String, Object)}.
*
* @param tagName the tag name
* @return the tag value
* @see #setTag(String, Object)
*/
<Q> Q getTag(String tagName);
As can be seen from the implementation of these methods in AbstractAutoBean, these store their data in a totally separate object from what is sent over the wire. The downside is that you'll need to get the underlying AutoBean object (see com.google.web.bindery.autobean.shared.AutoBeanUtils.getAutoBean(U) for one way to do this) in order to invoke these methods.