[jsword-devel] SwordBookMetaData

[DM Smith]

It really was not a biggie, but I wanted to get rid of the trailing comma in 
the tree of installed and installable books in the books dialog.

I found that it is a simple change to getFullName().

But one thing got me looking at another, and that, yet another.

First thing I noticed was that the listing of the BookMetaData when a book 
is selected seems to be randomly ordered. I traced this down to the use of 
Properties, which is unordered. So I found that in Java 1.4 there is a new 
Map called LinkedHashMap that will provide its keys or values in insertion 
order. If this were used to maintain the properties then they could be 
listed as they were in the file.

I found that there is one other implementation of BookMetaData, called 
DefaultBookMetaData. I examined the use of the Properties object in it and 
found that it has a problem in the various set routines. It tries to "put" 
the value in the properties as objects and not strings, which is stongly 
discouraged in the documentation. And the object stored against a key is 
sometimes a string and sometimes an other kind of object. The access of the 
value would be suspect with that. If it were expected to be a string when it 
is not or is expected to be a Date when it is a string may cause a runtime 
error. In tracing the use of DefaultBookMetaData, it seemed to be in classes 
intended for future use.

In looking at how the BookMetaData properties were used I could not find a 
real use beyond displaying the contents. Every KEY_* stored in it was double 
stored in a member variable. My guess is that the various KEY_* are present 
for a future use.

I also found the following about SwordBookMetaData *.conf files:
The first line is blank. Is there any reason to store that?
The second line is of the form [KJV]. This looks like a MS windows style 
section identifier. Is this really needed to be kept? I think that if we are 
trying to preserve the output, then yes.
Some keys are repeated and are simply concatenated together in the 
properties. Should these be separated?
Some lines look like continuation lines. (See Webster's Revised Unabridged 
Dictionary of the English Language.) The key line ends with a \ which seems 
to indicate that the next line should be concatenated, if it is not of the 
form key=value.

Anyway, I am working on some changes to this and will send a patch later, 
maybe tomorrow.

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