[xwiki-devs] [Proposal][Model] Entity References - Absolute vs Relative

Hi devs, I'm almost done with my entity reference refactoring and I've just realized I have missed something I think. So far the implementation only supports Absolute references (i.e the entity reference factory always return a reference with all parts filled - you choose to use a default factory or a current entity depending on how you wish to resolve the names when they have not been provided in the passed reference string). I now think we must also support relative references (i.e. when some parts can be null) and that it's up to the user of the api to decide if they want to convert a relative reference to an absolute one or not. Here's a use case: renaming of documents. For exemple documents have links specified as a string representing the target doc name. If we don't have relative references then we need to decide if we want to use the default serializer (all parts printed including wiki name) or the compact serializer (only parts different from context reference printed). This doesn't support printing only what the user had decided to fill. For ex a user might have specified voluntarily the space and page name and right now with my implementation he'll get only the page name specified if the new space is the same as the space for the current doc. So here's my proposal: * Entity Reference Factory leaves parts to null when not specified in the string representation. * We add a EntityReference.getAbsoluteReference(EntityReference base) method to return an absolute reference. It's resolved against the passed base reference (i.e. parts not specified are taken from it) WDYT? I'm going to start refactoring my code to do this later today so please let me know if you see any pb with it. Thanks -Vincent