Hi,

I am wondering about constraint initialization, especially in the context of composite constraints. The current interface for Constraint looks like this:

Effectively you are passing the constraint annotation itself into initialize(). This works fine for constraints defined on beans. However, in the case of composing constraints it makes things harder since parameters can be overridden. Woudln't it be better to pass a map into initalize()?
Another reason why I think this is useful is that one could in this case instantiate and initialize a constraint using ConstraintDescriptor information only ( ConstraintDescriptor contains getConstraintClass() and getParameters() which returns the parameters as map). This is otherwise not possible.

Any comments?

--Hardy

I don't like the Map approach very much
But what you can do is build the annotation instance using a dynamic proxy. Remember that an annotation is an interface.
The dynamic proxy can itself use the Map<String, Object>.
Check commons annotations we do just that.
That way the BV user still see a type safe annotation and not the messy Map.