Don't crash when encountering a byte[]

[johnefrancis]

Fail gracefully presenting a clear error message when encountering a byte[]. Or diff it.

[SQiShER]

Ha, that sounds reasonable! 😄

The good news about diffing is, that I started working on a Differ for ordered collections, which involves an algorithm that can probably also be applied to Strings and Arrays. So once that is in place, it shouldn't be too hard to make it work for Arrays. Actually, after ordered collections I think arrays are the last missing piece in order to release the 1.0 version. However, diffing is the easy part. Merging is much, much harder.

Until then a clear error message would be a really good thing to have.

[Wolfgang-Winter]

Beware when diffing arrays. You could think of applying different strategies for that. One being an element per element diffing like in Collections. But often that is not what people may want. Imagine an image or certificate in a byte[] property. You don't want to be bothered by an element level difference, normally you are interested in knowing is it the same image or a different. Therefore array diffing depends on the use case. I wrote a PrimitiveArrayDiffer for arrays of primitives that applies the later strategy. I configure it like this:
ObjectDifferBuilder.startBuilding().inclusion().resolveUsing(new CibetInclusionResolver()).and()
.differs().register(new PrimitiveArrayDifferFactory()).build()
hope that is the right way to do it, it is not easy to see for me as I am old-fashioned and not used to fluent programming style. 😕

Wolfgang

[SQiShER]

@Wolfgang-Winter Looks good to me! I'll keep both strategies in mind, when I start working on this.