[Glen Ihrig]

Spring Annotator feedback.

ME4S 8.6.1
OS X 10.5.8

While doing the Tutorial – “MyEclipse for Spring 8.6: Spring Annotators”, I encountered some frustration working though the step applying annotations to class methods. No serious problems here, but there is room for improvement in the usability of the Annotator feature. Perhaps this is a Mac only issue…

Specifically regarding Section 5. Configure as Spring Controller, Item 5.

“The Spring annotator will also let you further configure the class methods with annotations that are relevant to Spring controllers. If you highlight the doSomethingOne() method in code or the annotator’s outline view, the configuration panel will show you a list of available method-level annotations. Select @RequestMapping, specify “/dosomething.html” for the URL, and select GET and POST as the methods. As you configure the method using the annotator, the Java code is immediately updated to reflect the configuration.”

1. A comment on the tutorial: It would be helpful to break the above paragraph into shorter sentences and bullet points.

Back on topic:
2. Attempting to follow the instruction “highlight the doSomethingOne() method in code…” did not always work in my experience. Selecting the method in code did not affect the Spring Annotations view.

Solution: Highlighting the method in the annotator's outline view always worked.

3. Working between the code and the annotator was often confusing because the code editor and the annotator’s outline view jumped around a lot, causing me to loose my place in the code.

Solution: Use the annotator's outline view to select locations in the code editor.

4. Creating the annotation as instructed in the tutorial was problematic.

“Select @RequestMapping, specify “/dosomething.html” for the URL, and select GET and POST as the methods”

This failed, because after typing the url, when I selected a method checkbox, the url was erased.

Solution: Enter the url, then save the class, then select a method. 

5. It would be helpful, if new entries in the annotator’s outline view were sorted alphabetically, rather than appearing at the end of the list. This is done when the source document is opened, it would be nice if it could be done when the source document is saved as well.

Overall, the annotator is a very useful feature that I expect to use frequently, a truly valuable addition to MyEclipse for Spring.

Best regards,

-Glen

[neyde]

Glen,

Your feedback is very timely. I happen to be updating this tutorial for ME4S 9.0 today, and I’ve incorporated your feedback. I’ve logged your other issues.

Thanks,
Niel

[Author]

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