Gobal beanInfo is not package specific

Name: wm7046 Date: 06/12/97


I just found out, much to my chagrin, that the BeanInfo spec has a serious flaw. The spec allows for a global definition of a BeanInfo to exist somewhere in a searchpath settable using the
Introspector.setBeanInfoSearchpath() method. By default, the
searchpath is set to sun.beans.infos. JavaSoft ships one beanInfo class called ComponentBeanInfo. It so happens that I have a base class in its own package called Component which does not have its own beanInfo class. I was counting on the default introspection to give me info about subclasses of this class but started getting some extremely strange results. Can
the problem of global beanInfo not being package specific be fixed? The same thing appears to happen with property editors.

import java.lang.reflect.*;
import java.beans.*;


class Component
{
  int someProperty = 1;

  public int getSomeProperty() { return someProperty; }
  public void setSomeProperty( int s ) { someProperty = s; }
}

public class Bug
{
  public static void main(String[] args)
    {
      try {
        Component aComponent = new Component();
        System.out.println( "aComponent class = " +
                            aComponent.getClass() );
        BeanInfo beanInfo = Introspector.getBeanInfo( aComponent.getClass() );
        System.out.println( "BeanInfo class = " +
                            beanInfo.getBeanDescriptor().getBeanClass() );

        PropertyDescriptor pds[] = beanInfo.getPropertyDescriptors();
        for ( int i = 0; i < pds.length; i++ ) {
          System.out.println("prop = " + pds[i].getName() );
        }
      }
      catch (Exception e) {
        System.out.println("Exception caught: " + e );
      }
    }
}

D:\java_bugs>java bug
aComponent class = class Component
BeanInfo class = class Component
prop = enabled
prop = foreground
prop = visible
prop = background
prop = font
prop = name
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