The current parser handles metadata annotations
'@' Identifier '(' Text ')'
so that the annotations for one entity (e.g., a rule) are available as a Map<String,Object>, where the key is given by the Identifier and the value of the entry is available according to
if Text can be completely parsed as Identifier '=' Expression (where Expression is whatever the DRL parser accepts as an expression, i.e., an extended subset of Java expressions)
then
the value is a Map<String,String>
else
the value is a String, with trimmed leading and trailing white space, but preserving all embedded white space
Changes compared to 5.1.1:
- no Map was ever returned in 5.1.1,
- @m( "foo" ) in 5.1.1. returned "foo", but 5.2.0 returns "\"foo\"".
- @m( "foo", "bar" ) in 5.1.1. returned "foo\", \"bar", but 5.2.0 returns "\"foo\", \"bar\""
- comments between "@...(" and ")" are now handled consistently but were not in 5.1.1
Possibly considered a problem for 5.2.0 or later:
- No check is made for duplicate "outer" map keys; entries are overwritten.
- Repeated "inner" map keys produce concatenated entries, e.g. @m( k = 1, k = "a" ) returns "1a" as the value for key "k".
- Returning (arbitrary) expressions, unchanged, as String now may cause incompatibilitie with more sophisticated processing (if this ever should be considered).
-W