Strict mode

[DevNico]

I want to propose another build option I'd call strict mode which disables automatically setting fields to null if there is no mapper function available. The warning can be ignored to easily this option would fail the build if a mapper cannot be found.

Sidenote: The implementation should probably find as many errors as possible before failing in the end.

[tenhobi]

Is there some benefit to doing that? When such a parameter has a nullable type, and even when it has a default value, it still works the same as if not passing anything, or not? 🤔

[DevNico]

Syntactically it works yes. But I already see this becoming a source of problems because the warning about setting the value to null can easily be ignored. Even tho a parameter can be nullable if the input wasn't the output probably shouldn't be. This nullability makes such an issue not easy to find later because the app wouldn't error anywhere since the UI is probably built to handle null. An experienced developer might know about this, read the warning and fix the mistake but not everybody does/should know to look out for those warnings.

[tenhobi]

And are you suggesting not to put nulls (when mapping is not found) only to named/optional parameters, where it's okay, or also for positional parameters, where that would be an error?

[DevNico]

I think two levels of strictness might make sense.

1. Never set null unless explicitly set in the MapType
2. Only set null if the source doesn't exist e.g. the target can only be mapped as null. This would fail if the source has a matching field but a MapType/TypeConverter is missing.

[tenhobi]

I think 2 is how it works now -- when fields match, but no maptype/typeconverter is configured, it fails.

1 can be done probably. Would you want to spec that, then confirm the spec with us, and code it?

[DevNico]

I think 2 is how it works now -- when fields match, but no maptype/typeconverter is configured, it fails.

I'll have to look for an example but I think it just prints a warning and sets it to null. Since this is not a blocker like the TypeConverter feature I'm not sure when I'll get to it (I kinda also abandoned TypeConverters because of other priorities) but I'm open to discussion and we'll see who implements it when. I just wanted to get the suggestion out for discussion :D