Writing negative unit test cases for Metadata Parsers I realized we are not Throwing exception in case of mandatory element missing.
We are not validating xml file too, so even if these elements are defined as mandatory from xsd parser just try to parse them and in a lot of cases it got success. The result is (for example) a DataSource without driver class defined that is totally bad.
We should of course avoid these situations, and xsd validation is not a solution IMHO since our metadata could be build not only from xml but also from annotation and maybe in future updated from a management console.
It's not a little (even if it's not very big) work since all metadata have to be revisited and updated to verify and validate input data in constructor throw exception and so on. Maybe it would better to switch from current constructors strategy to a builder pattern for metadata providing validation of inputs, but I have to think about that.
IMHO it's a top priority task.
Opinions?
S.