unknown warning from attributeDefinition

[Cantor, Scott]

On 5/17/22, 7:22 PM, "users on behalf of YF Lai" <users-bounces at shibboleth.net on behalf of ccyflai at ust.hk> wrote:

>    I made an attributeDefinition only available in c14/attribute resolution phase.  The definition worked as
> expected but it gave a warning of below that seems irrelevant.   Do you have any clue about this?

It's an artifact of Spring's support for converting data types when it constructs things. We installed converters that let you specify strings like true and false into a boolean property and it auto-converts that.

When an object has properties that are overloaded to take different types of inputs, unfortunately Spring will attempt various conversions while it decides what the "best" match to use is, and one of the converters it runs has a warning logged.

Why it's happening here is not 100% clear to me, but because the resolutionPhases setting essentially auto-wires an activationCondition, it's probably similar to other situations where we auto-wire conditions where I have seen that warning more often.

Every release I go in and think about taking the warning out and then end up concerned that the lack of a warning will cause more problems if somebody really does misspell "true" somewhere so I leave it. It's not obvious which is better at this point, but unfortunately the code doesn't know whether it's a legitimate warning or noise as in this case.

-- Scott