[hibernate-dev] Attribute paths and '.' versus '#' as separator

[Steve Ebersole]

This is a bit of a potentially insidious one.  Not the best way to start
off a discussion, I know :)

The premise is this... Until now Hibernate has represented attribute roles
using dots.  For an attribute named 'department' on the com.acme.Employee
entity, the role would be "com.acme.Employee.department".  In terms of
embeddables, say Employee had an 'address' embedded with its own attributes
like 'city'.  Then, the full role for 'city' would be
"com.acme.Employee.address.city".

As you can start to see the dots here are completely indistinguishable in
terms of those which define the package/class and those which identify the
attribute "path".

So one of the things I started playing with in 5 is to replace the
separators used in attribute paths to use '#', such that
"com.acme.Employee.address.city" would instead be
"com.acme.Employee#address#city".  This makes the role fully parseable
which is actually useful in quite a few situations.  And it REALLY helps in
things I have just started working on like storing metadata for composites
(embeddeds/embeddables) on the SessionFactory, which is the first step in
support for some cool new features around embeddables like discriminated
inheritance support.

However, there is a minor drawback.  Like all attributes, collections have
a role.  Unfortunately the use of '.' in their role Strings leaks into the
SPI in terms of locating the CollectionPersisters.

So the question is whether to continue with this path of replacing the use
of '.' with '#' for attribute path separators.  The drawback is
unfortunate.  The benefit is very nice, but I can't really say it is
required atm.

Votes?  Thoughts?