June has requested that IDs be added to the <http> and <file-cache>
elements so that the create/delete commands can be
implemented/documented as usual. There are arguments for and against
doing this so I'm going to try to enumerate them all so that we can come
to a consensus about this.
As I understand things, IDs are usually only given to elements that are
cross referenced from others. In the cases of <http> and <file-cache>
they are embedded in parents and never referred to externally. The
awkwardness with having no IDs present (at least on file-cache) is that
a glassfish admin would need to know the ID of the grandparent
(<protocol> in this case) because <http> itself doesn't have an ID
either. One solution, of course, is to add IDs all the way down.
Another possibility would be to take either the protocol ID or the
network-listener ID. That would look like:
asadmin create-file-cache --networklistener=http-listener-1
or
asadmin create-file-catch --protocol=protocol-1
This would frame the create/delete in the context of the logical
constructs that would use that file-cache which actually might lower
some of the mental hurdles in configuring the system. Not having IDs on
the elements might make the list commands awkward, but I'm not entirely
sure those commands make much sense for these elements anyway.
One disadvantage of adding IDs to these elements now (and i'm including
<ssl>, <http>, and <file-cache> in this for consistency) is that it
would break existing domain.xml files found in every installation of v3
preview onward. This may or may not matter as I don't think there's any
official requirement to support v3 upgrades, but thought I'd mention
it. The fix for this is as simple as copying over the generated
domain.xml from distributions/glassfish in to the config dir for a
glassfish instance. Of course, if you've customized your domain.xml,
you'd need to manually add IDs to these elements. I'm not sure we
really have any automated upgrade facilities that deal with breaking
schema changes like this one would be.
I could go with either decision but I'd like to go with one that's the
correct approach. Does anyone have a strong feeling either way?