attribute filter RuleReference ?

[Rod Widdowson]

> I guess I should say that before I started this thread I spent a
> little time trying to implement RuleReference in the OrMatcherParser
> and was not successful.

I'm not sure I understand - what are you trying to insert into an Or?  The
schema only allows PermitRuleRef DenyRuleRef, AttributeRuleRef and
PolicyRuleRef.   

If  you talking about adding more referencing over and above that currently
allowed in the schema then  I'd advise against that, and in particular
having MatchFunctors (in the schema sense) referenced.  It will completely
break the parsing and implementation model we have finally agreed upon, and
I don't see it adding any value, particularly given that we have survived
this far without even the referencing suggested by the schema.

> The method I tried was builder.addConstructorArgReference(), but
> Spring throws a BeanCreationException :
> 
> "Could not resolve matching constructor (hint: specify index/type/name
> arguments for simple parameters to avoid type ambiguities)"

That basically means you didn't give is a reference to a bean which hasn't
been declared.  Something to watch out for is that names all have to go
through #getAbsoluteReference() which does the uniqification inside the
spring namespace.

This actually raises a minor issue in that the errors back from spring when
doing this stuff are not particularly user friendly.  I do not think we need
to worry about this at this time, but it's worth bearing in mind.

I turns out, by the way, that I actually coded up support for the 4
references noted above when I started to work on the parser code last month.
I have just made the change to only collect references from the ref
attribute as we decided earlier this week.

/Rod