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[Proposal] Use unboxed boolean types in ResourceHandlerRequest

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#341 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Refactor
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
java
Domain
tooling

Research direction

Start by locating ResourceHandlerRequest and reviewing the two linked commits that introduced the boxed Boolean fields. Check how snapshotRequested and rollback are used, then determine whether primitive booleans are appropriate and whether existing tests cover null or boolean condition checks. Done means the rationale is resolved and the chosen flag types work safely for callers.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement good first issue

There are 2 recent changes that landed in ResourceHandlerRequest: https://github.com/aws-cloudformation/cloudformation-cli-java-plugin/commit/ebca1dc12e187b484ed599db65d726a6b23a14c0#diff-adfb207dac8dff5107b68b36280ccad4525f92176184ad2ffff9aa7e591b2e8a and https://github.com/aws-cloudformation/cloudformation-cli-java-plugin/commit/e34f0472d0bc67953f41d4ceb666a175d0a7fb2d#diff-adfb207dac8dff5107b68b36280ccad4525f92176184ad2ffff9aa7e591b2e8a.

Both changes favor boxed Boolean over primitive types.

As a result, the usage of this class implies on importing BooleanUtils or a similar helper in order to avoid constructions like: if (request.getSnapshotRequested() != null && request.getSnapshotRequested() == true) { ... }.

And the code that is performing a "naive" boolean comparison like: if (request.getSnapshotRequested()) { ... } will fail with a null-pointer exception.

The same stands for the rollback flag.

I wonder if var type boxing was done for some specific reasons? If there are no strict reasons, I would vote for unboxing them to simplify condition checking.

Dominant language
Java
Stars
30
Forks
48
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

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