[Helma-user] accessing type.properties

[Joshua Paine]

Breton Slivka wrote:
> You know what else you can do? You can set it programatically.

I saw those methods when I was investigating this, but didn't think to 
try anything with them. (Maybe 'cause type.properties never really 
bothered me?)

> I immediately set out to write an example of replacing
> type.properties with an Object Literal in javascript.

Is this tested and working? Does it work for all properties, even 
_extends? Since helma will see and use changes to types while running 
already, I guess this should work. Would love to hear from Hannes that 
this won't cause lots of expensive cache invalidations that wouldn't 
happen otherwise.

Really cool, though. And now that the possibility of controlling 
type.properties from script appears, I begin to think of some things I'd 
do with it.


I was going to reply with my discovery that you can put arbitrary named 
values in type.properties, and if you start with _ and they're not magic 
helma ones, they won't affect anything. So it'd be easy to specify the 
order there--still a bit of repeating oneself, but all in one place at 
least. This is a lot more interesting, though, and suggests ways to 
optionally put more metadata into the [script version of] type 
properties to get better forms for minimal effort.