[jbosstools-dev] Question on Good Practice Re: Servers and Runtimes

[Rob Stryker]

WTP allows adopters to change the id and the name, if they want.  Most 
adopters (apache, generic server,  etc) do *not* change the id, but 
rather leave the id with the timestamp string. This, of course, makes 
copying a server file into your workspace to create the server 
impossible because the odds of having a runtime with the same timestamp 
id are close to zero.

max.andersen at redhat.com wrote:
> What does wtp do ?
>
> /max (sent from my phone)
>
>
> On 13/01/2009, at 07.00, Rob Stryker <rob.stryker at redhat.com> wrote:
>
>> Currently, server and runtime objects in wtp have "names", the 
>> displayable value, and "ids", the value in their serialized file 
>> which links together the various pieces.
>>
>> In the past, I used the WTP default of a timestamp-type "id", and 
>> assigned names to the server and runtime objects. But it was 
>> discovered that doing that made it almost impossible to "share" this 
>> server object in a repository. The server would reference some vague 
>> timestamped runtime, and it would be impossible to create a runtime 
>> of that timestamp really.
>>
>> So I switched to  having the name and the id be exactly the same. The 
>> side effect of this is that, when you change the runtime or server's 
>> name, you're changing it's "id" also, and so by changing a runtime's 
>> name, any server's that link to it now point to a not-found runtime.  
>> This is in addition to any projects that referenced that runtime.
>>
>> This is very related to JBIDE-3391, where the user changed the 
>> runtime's name from within the server editor, but then did *not* save 
>> the dirty server editor to update the reference. This broke his 
>> deployment, and though the JIRA doesn't mention it, the user would 
>> actually not be able to re-open the server editor =P  Admittedly this 
>> issue is the user's fault as he didn't save the dirty server 
>> editor... but if he had changed the runtime's name from the runtime 
>> preference window, instead of the editor, there'd be no recourse *at 
>> all*. ALL the servers and projects would reference a stale 
>> nonexistent runtime object.
>>
>> Since the default Runtime id is a timestamp-like string, it assumes 
>> that you can change the name all you want, and that doing so will not 
>> create stale objects. But months ago we decided we liked having names 
>> as our id instead of random timestamp strings.  I'm honestly not sure 
>> what to do here. It's obvious to me that the id must be an unchanging 
>> string and a timestamp is as good as any...
>>
>> Look forward to input.
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