Apache Commons Community Fixed numerous typos in user guides. Update Apache Commons Lang from 3.7 to 3.8.1. FileHandlerReloadingDetector now has a new refresh() method to initialize the reloading state from the underlying file. This new method is called by DefaultReloadingDetectorFactory when a new detector instance is created. This makes sure that a changed configuration file is directly detected on the first invocation of the isReloadingRequired() method. Configuration properties can now be converted to regular expressions. With JupIOFactory a new IOFactory implementation is now available that implements handling of whitespace in a way closer to java.util.Properties. This class can be used when stricter compatibility with Java standard methods for reading and writing properties files is needed. JupIOFactory (introduced for CONFIGURATION-715) also implements handling of escape sequences in a way closer to java.util.Properties. Replace use of deprecated Commons Lang string substitution code for Commons Text. Update Java requirement from version 7 to 8. Update Jackson from 2.9.6 to 2.9.7. Update optional dependency snakeyaml from 1.21 to 1.23. Update optional Spring dependencies from 4.3.18.RELEASE to 4.3.19.RELEASE. Add support for Commons Text 1.4 localhost string lookup as a default lookup. Update Apache Commons Text from 1.4 to 1.5. Add support for Commons Text 1.5 new string lookups as default lookups. org.apache.commons.configuration2.DatabaseConfiguration never closes result sets and statements. Update Apache Commons Text from 1.5 to 1.6. Update Spring from 4.3.14.RELEASE to 4.3.18.RELEASE. Update optional dependency snakeyaml from 1.20 to 1.21. Update Jackson from 2.9.5 to 2.9.6. Root node attributes are now updated correctly when loading XML configuration files. Added a .gitignore file to the project. Update Apache Commons Codec from 1.10 to 1.11. Update Jackson from 2.8.9 to 2.9.3. Update Apache Commons Lang from 3.6 to 3.7. Update Apache Commons VFS from 2.1 to 2.2. Update Snakeyaml from 1.18 to 1.19. Update optional dependency snakeyaml from 1.19 to 1.20. Update Spring from 4.3.9.RELEASE to 4.3.13.RELEASE. Update optional dependency Jackson from 2.9.3 to 2.9.5. Update optional dependency Spring from 4.3.13.RELEASE to 4.3.14.RELEASE. JSONConfiguration can now handle list structures with complex objects as elements. Fixed a memory leak in CombinedConfigurationBuilder. Builder for the child sources were created each time a new result configuration was requested; thus the list with child builders got longer and longer. This also had an impact on reloading because unnecessary reloading operations could be triggered. Now it is guaranteed that child builders are created only once. Fixed a bug related to the handling of multiple include files in PropertiesConfiguration. ExprLookup.getVariables() no longer returns null, but a copy of the current variables of this lookup object. ExprLookup now handles expressions that do not return a string result by converting them to string. ConversionExceptions thrown when accessing the properties of a configuration now contain the original cause of the exception. Configuration properties can now be converted to the data types File and Path. Add org.apache.commons.configuration2.MapConfiguration.toString(). CompositeConfiguration now supports an addConfigurationFirst() method to add child configurations with a higher priority. XMLConfiguration now handles elements correctly whose value consists only of whitespace if the xml:space attribute is set to preserve. Added an Automatic-Module-Name header to the manifest for compatibility with the Java 9 module system. Fixed a NPE in INIConfiguration when saving a configuration with an empty section. The node model returned by SubnodeConfiguration.getNodeModel() has now the correct root node set. Update optional Spring dependency from 4.2.5.RELEASE to 4.3.9.RELEASE. Update Apache Commons Lang from 3.3.2 to 3.6. Add convenience ctor ConfigurationRuntimeException(String, Object...). Add org.apache.commons.configuration2.AbstractHierarchicalConfiguration.toString(). Add API org.apache.commons.configuration2.tree.ImmutableNode.getChildren(String). Fixed a typo in the upgrade to 2.0 guide. Update platform requirement from Java 6 to 7. Add toString() methods here and there to help debugging. Add API org.apache.commons.configuration2.DataConfiguration.getURI(String) methods. Added new YAMLConfiguration class to support configuration files in YAML format. ConfigurationUtils and ConfigurationConverter now offer better support for immutable configurations. INIConfiguration can now be configured to use a custom separator between properties and values when writing an ini file. Added new JSONConfiguration class to support configuration files in JSON format. Improved the handling of lists defined by a string with delimiter characters in XMLConfiguration. Such lists now retain their original format when the configuration is saved. Made the IOFactory property of PropertiesBuilderParameter compatible with the most recent version of Commons BeanUtils. This version changed the handling of properties starting with multiple uppercase letters. PropertiesConfiguration now works correctly with the auto-save mode. PropertiesConfigurationLayout no longer duplicates a header comment if a file with another comment is loaded. Documentation improvements for the user's guide. Improved documentation of FileBased interface. The Javadocs now state explicitly that the methods should not be called by client code. Exception handling in configuration classes implementing FileLocatorAware has been improved. PropertiesConfiguration now correctly unescapes some special characters that are always escaped in Java properties files. In the OSGi bundle manifest of the Commons Configuration bundle the package imports for Spring packages are now marked as optional. Improved handling of temporary files and folders in unit tests. Updated dependency to Commons BeanUtils to version 1.9.3. This fixes an issue with an exception stacktrace that was logged when a ConfigurationBuilder was used. PropertiesConfigurationLayout now allows manipulating the order of keys when the properties file is written. HomeDirectoryLocationStrategy now works correctly in the mode that evaluates the FileLocator's base path. Interpolation was improved to better support properties with multiple values. The methods getStringArray() and getList() of CompositeConfiguration now support the interpolation of variables that reference properties with multiple values. Support for the ant build was dropped. ImmutableConfiguration.getArray() has been deprecated. Arrays can now be queried using the generic get() method in a type-safe way. Support Commons Configuration as PropertySource in Spring. Fixed a problem in INIConfiguration.write() with keys containing a separator character. This separator had been duplicated. Such keys are now handled correctly when the configuration is saved. Update Apache Commons VFS from 2.0 to 2.1. Update optional dependency Apache Commons Codec from 1.9 to 1.10. Moved ConfigurationLogger class to io package to avoid cyclic dependencies between packages. Fixed two invalid examples in the user's guide for file-based configurations. CombinedConfigurationBuilder now supports inheritance of its parameters to child configuration sources. This is enabled by default. When using immutable configurations exceptions thrown by the wrapped configuration came out as UndeclaredThrowableException. This has been fixed; now the correct original exception is thrown. Changed generic types in the signatures of a MapConfiguration constructor and AbstractConfiguration.getList(String, List). These changes were made in version 1.10 as fixes for CONFIGURATION-557 and CONFIGURATION-558. But it had been missed to merge them to trunk. References to Commons Logging have been removed from the Configuration API. It is still possible to influence logging by making use of the new ConfigurationLogger abstraction. The return type of ConfigurationBuilder.getConfiguration() was changed from Configuration to ImmutableConfiguration because this is the base interface for all configuration objects. Fixed a bug in PropertiesConfiguration related to the loading of include files. The FileHandler used for this purpose was not fully initialized. Adapted the return type of ReloadingFileBasedConfigurationBuilder.configure(). XMLConfiguration no longer drops keys when list delimiter characters occur in element values. Fixed a problem in the conversion of a flat configuration to a hierarchical one that could cause the loss of properties in a combined configuration constructed by an override combiner. Removed obsolete ConfigurationBuilder interface in the base package. DefaultExpressionEngine can now be customized to match configuration keys in a case-insensitive manner. This is useful for instance for dealing with Windows INI files. Added support for querying encoded properties. PropertiesConfiguration now supports again properties without a value and a separator character. The keys of such properties are added to the configuration with an empty String as value. XMLPropertyListConfiguration can now save arrays in the correct form. A size() method was added to the ImmutableConfiguration interface. Removed methods from ConfigurationConverter related to ExtendedProperties. This class is no longer supported by recent versions of Commons Collections. Removed Serializable interface from all configuration implementations. Some configuration classes declared this interface without being actually serializable. The name of the top-level package and the maven coordinates have been changed to allow a coexistence of Commons Configuration 1.x with 2.0. The event mechanism has been reworked. There is now a generic event listener interface which can be used to receive notifications from multiple types of event sources. Fixed a StringIndexOutOfBoundsException in PropertiesConfigurationLayout which was caused by lines containing only whitespace. A migration guide has been created which supports when upgrading from version 1.x to 2.0. The user's guide has been fully reworked to cover all new and enhanced features of version 2.0. The dependency to Commons Collections is no longer needed. A new abstract base class for hierarchical configurations was introduced which supports arbitrary hierarchical data structures. The type of the nodes used by the configuration can now be specified as a generic type argument. This makes the integration of other hierarchical structures easier. Hierarchical configurations now operate on immutable structures. Data is no longer represented by ConfigurationNode objects. The ImmutableNode class now serves as data container. XPathExpressionEngine can now deal with namespace prefixes in node and attribute names. When a CombinedConfiguration is cleared it removes itself as change listener from all child configurations. This fixes a possible memory leak. Fixed a possible ConcurrentModificationException when a SystemConfiguration instance is passed to the append() or copy() methods. XMLBeanDeclaration now escapes node names before they are used to determine nested properties. The DefaultExpressionEngine class is now immutable. An instance can be shared between multiple configuration objects. Improved the API of ExprLookup. It is now possible to define default values for initialization properties of configurations. Fixed a bug in the handling of the xml:space attribute in XMLConfiguration. The attribute is now also applied to the current element, not only to sub elements. BeanHelper is no longer a static utility class. Instances can be created with a specific configuration of bean factories. There is still a default instance which can be obtained via the BeanHelper.INSTANCE field. The code for accessing configuration files hs been reworked. Methods related to locating configuration files have been moved from ConfigurationUtils to a new FileLocatorUtils class. Customizable strategy classes (implementing the new FileLocationStrategy) can be used for searching for configuration files. The data type conversion mechanism has been made extensible. There is a new interface ConversionHandler which controls the data type conversions available for a configuration object. By setting a custom implementation, conversions can be adapted or extended. Conversion to Character is now supported. BeanHelper can now process BeanDefinitions initializing properties of collection types of their target beans. Added missing dependencies to build.xml. The mechanism for synchronizing configurations has been completely redesigned. It is now based on Synchronizer objects which can be configured by client code. A new chapter was added to the user's guide regarding thread-safety of configurations. MapConfiguration now directly uses a Properties object passed to its constructor as data store rather than copying it. This allows SystemConfiguration to be connected to system properties; i.e. changing a property through SystemConfiguration immediately affects the corresponding system property. Multi-file configurations are no longer restricted to XML configuration files. Arbitrary file-based configurations are now supported. The deprecated INIConfiguration class was removed. HierarchicalINIConfiguration was renamed to INIConfiguration. The deprecated ConfigurationFactory class was removed. File-based configurations are now implemented in a different way. The interfaces FileConfiguration and ReloadingStrategy have been removed, also the base classes AbstractFileConfiguration and AbstractHierarchicalFileConfiguration. They are replaced by the FileBased interface and the FileHandler class which implements central I/O functionality. Reloading is now in the responsibility of configuration builders. DatabaseConfiguration now provides get methods for querying its properties defining the underlying database structures. The includesAllowed property of PropertyConfiguration is now independent from the existence of a base path. DatabaseConfiguration now automatically converts CLOBs to strings if they appear in property values. Concurrent access to configurations and reloading have been completely redesigned. Because reloading is now handled by configuration builders there is no need to acquire a lock in order to protected against a reload operations. AbstractConfiguration.clearPropertyDirect() is now abstract. XMLPropertiesConfiguration now supports loading from and saving to DOM nodes. PropertiesConfiguration now keeps a comment at the bottom of a properties file. A new footer property was added for reading and writing this footer comment. Interpolation now works correctly after a configuration was cloned. The ConfigurationInterpolator instance is now cloned, too. ConfigurationUtils.fileFromUrl() now correctly handles URL containing encoded percent characters. Support for reloading of configuration data has been reworked. Configuration objects are now created via configuration builders. A new API for configuration builders has been added. Classes and interfaces related to interpolation have been slightly reworked. ConfigurationInterpolator is now thread-safe. There are multiple ways to define the ConfigurationInterpolator object to be used by an AbstractConfiguration instance. Hierarchical configurations now provide methods to obtain sub configurations for all child elements of a given key. PropertiesConfiguration no longer escapes double quotes on saving. The visibility of some internal methods of PropertiesConfiguration.PropertiesWriter has been increased to protected. This simplifies the implementation of a custom escaping strategy. Bean declarations now support constructor invocations. HierarchicalConfiguration is now an interface. The base implementation class is named BaseHierarchicalConfiguration. It is now possible to obtain an immutable view on a Configuration or HierarchicalConfiguration object. New interfaces, ImmutableConfiguration, and ImmutableHierarchicalConfiguration have been introduced. Generic get() methods have been added to the Configuration interface. These methods expect a target class and try to convert the value of the specified property to this target class. Removed obsolete nested classes Node and NodeVisitor of HierarchicalConfiguration. The related deprecated class ConfigurationKey was removed, too. XMLConfiguration no longer supports attributes with multiple values or list delimiter parsing in attributes. This feature was complex and error prone and brought little value to the user. SubnodeConfiguration now provides a new method for clearing it and removing its root node from the parent configuration. The method HierarchicalConfiguration.configurationsAt() now returns a list of SubnodeConfiguration so that it is easier to make direct use of this feature. XMLConfiguration now adds attributes of elements defining a list to all list nodes. Concurrent access to configurations and reloading have been completely redesigned. This should reduce the amount of synchronization. Removed some static fields for specifying global default values. Using static fields in this way is thread-hostile. There are now alternatives for setting default values. Updated dependency to Commons Lang from version 2.6 to 3.1. EventSource is now an interface. With BaseEventSource there is a default implementation. The handling of list delimiters and their escape characters has been reworked. A new ListDelimiterHandler interface was introduced allowing applications to customize the treatment of list delimiters. Concurrent access to configurations has been reworked. With the new reloading mechanism automatic and periodic reloading checks can be performed. Reloading checks can now be performed in a background thread. It is now possible to define the strategy used for locating configuration files. Reloading can no longer corrupt a configuration instance. This is now handled by a configuration builder; the original configuration instance is not modified. It is now possible to influence the conversion from a container object (a collection or an array) to a single value (e.g. what is returned by getString() if the current property has multiple values). Per default, the first value is returned. By overriding methods of the configuration's ConversionHandler, this behavior can be changed. XMLConfiguration now adds attributes of elements defining a list to all list nodes. PropertiesConfiguration now keeps a comment at the bottom of a properties file. A new footer property was added for reading and writing this footer comment. XMLPropertiesConfiguration now supports loading from and saving to DOM nodes. The includesAllowed property of PropertyConfiguration is now independent from the existence of a base path. BeanHelper can now process BeanDefinitions initializing properties of collection types of their target beans. Conversion to Character is now supported. Fixed a bug in the handling of the xml:space attribute in XMLConfiguration. The attribute is now also applied to the current element, not only to sub elements. In 1.7 and before, any change to the system properties was immediately reflected in a SystemConfiguration object. This behaviour broke in 1.8 and 1.9. This has been fixed for 1.10. In 1.7 and before, it was possible to pass an arbitrary Map into the constructor of MapConfiguration. With the generification in 1.8, this actually broke and it was no longer possible to pass in e.g. a Map<String, String> because the signature now required a Map<String, Object>. Changing the constructor to accept a Map<String, ?> restores this. Similar to CONFIGURATION-557, the getList(String, List) method was generified to be getList(String, List<Object>) but needs to be getList(String, List<?>) so that code that used a more specific list (such as a List<String>) still compiles against the new API. Small changes in user guide documentation. Improvements of basic features and AbstractConfiguration documentation. XMLPropertyListConfiguration no longer swallows exception caused by invalid date properties. Now a warning message is logged. List properties can now be set correctly on a HierarchicalConfiguration if delimiter parsing is disabled. Made static DateFormat fields in XMLPropertyListConfiguration.PListNode final and added a note about proper synchronization. DataConfiguration.get() now also works with String properties and if no data type conversion is required. DatabaseConfiguration now always closes the result set. The Import-Package section in the OSGi manifest now uses the resolution:=optional directive for optional dependencies. Variable substitution in configuration sources declared in a definition file for DefaultConfigurationBuilder now works across multiple sources. PropertyListConfiguration now can deal with C-style comments in plist configuration files. Both block and single-line comments are supported. Fixed possible ClassCastExceptions in CompositeConfiguration related to special in-memory configurations. Class ConfigurationKey was deprecated in favor of DefaultConfigurationKey. Implemented delimiter parsing in HierarchicalINIConfiguration to be consistent with other Configuration implementations. Note that this can impact existing code. To switch back to the old behavior, call setDelimiterParsingDisabled(true) before loading the configuration. CompositeConfiguration now provides better support for child configurations that are used as in-memory configuration. Classes generated by JavaCC are now created dynamically during the build process. Commons Configuration now requires Java 5 or later. Binary literals are now supported (i.e Ob11010001). Updated the dependency to Commons Jexl to version 2.1.1. This version provides correct OSGi manifest headers. Improved documentation of AbstractFileConfiguration related to load() methods and their impact on the base path. The project now uses standard Maven directory layout. Reloading now also works for configuration sources declared in the additional section of a configuration definition file for DefaultConfigurationBuilder. ConfigurationFactory has been deprecated. The user guide was updated to no more mention this class. HierarchicalConfiguration now provides a specific implementation of the clear() method. This is more efficient and also solves some other problems related to clearing a SubnodeConfiguration. Improved Javadocs of getKeys(String) method for some configuration classes. HierarchicalINIConfiguration.getSection() now creates a section if it does not exist. The SubnodeConfiguration returned by this method is now always connected to the parent ini configuration. XPathExpressionEngine now provides better support for the setProperty() method. The parsing of ini files has been improved for property definitions containing multiple separator characters. DefaultConfigurationBuilder now supports including environment properties using the "env" tag. XMLConfiguration now handles attributes correctly whose value is an empty string. Transforming a CombinedConfiguration with ViewNodes to an XMLConfiguration could cause problems with attributes. This has been fixed. Child configuration builders created for a <configuration> element in a configuration definition file now inherit the configuration and error listeners from the original DefaultConfigurationBuilder. This makes it possible to suppress log output created for optional configurations. JNDIConfiguration.getKeys() no more logs an exception if the prefix does not exist. Child configuration builders created for a <configuration> element in a configuration definition file now inherit some of their properties from the builder object which processed the file. The optional dependency to Apache Ant has been changed to the new groupId org.apache.ant. The version was updated to the most recent version 1.8.2 (older versions should still work). HierarchicalINIConfiguration now recognizes comment characters in property definitions only if they are preceded by whitespace. Thus comment characters can now be part of the property value. This is for instance required for the definition of file paths which use the semicolon as path separator. Minor improvements of the support for indexed properties in ConfigurationDynaBean. The methods getList() and getStringArray() of AbstractConfiguration can now handle single-valued properties of primitive types. XMLConfiguration no longer escapes backslashs in the values of XML elements. HierarchicalINIConfiguration now works correctly with configurations that contain only properties in the global section. testFromClassPath() can fail when it should not because of inconsistent escaping of output from PropertiesConfiguration.getURL() and FileChangedReloadingStrategy.getFile().toURL(). A bug related to the interpretation of escape sequences for backslashes has been fixed. The user guide has also been improved in this area. Files with a plus character in their names are now handled correctly. SubsetConfiguration now produces correct events. DatabaseConfiguration can now be instructed to perform a commit after an update of the managed database table. This makes it usable in environments where the connections do not use auto-commit mode. Added a refresh() method to AbstractFileConfiguration and AbstractHierarchicalFileConfiguration. HierarchicalINIConfiguration now correctly saves sections whose name contains delimiter characters. PropertiesConfiguration.save() escaped slashes in properties values. This was caused by a bug in commons-lang 2.4. Updating to the new version commons-lang 2.5 fixed this problem. Fixed a potential IllegalStateException in HierarchicalINIConfiguration that can be thrown when the global section is requested concurrently. XMLPropertyListConfiguration no longer throws a ConfigurationException if the file to be loaded does not have an outer dict element. The default expression engine used by hierarchical configurations used to throw a NumberFormatException if invalid indices were used in property keys. This has been fixed. As a side effect brackets can now be used in property keys. When an empty XMLConfiguration was saved and reloaded the root element was assigned an empty text value. Because of this isEmpty() returned false for this configuration. This has been fixed. Default variable interpolation now supports the env: prefix for referencing environment variables. Schema violation exceptions are now propagated back to the caller. XMLConfiguration and CombinedConfiguraton are now synchronized to fix problems caused by reloading in a multithreaded environment. HierarchicalConfiguration.NodeVisitor is now passed the correct key to its visitAfterChildren() method. BaseConfiguration.clone() now also clones collections stored in the internal map. This causes list properties to be handled correctly. DefaultConfigurationBuilder now supports defining ini files in its configuration definition file. Attribute or element values will not be escaped when attribute or element splitting are disabled. When using Commons Lang 2.6 or higher as dependency nested interpolation in variable names is supported. Empty dictionaries in a PropertyList configuration are now preserved when the configuration is saved. DatabaseConfiguration now generates correct events for the clear() and clearProperty() methods. Add ExprLookup to allow expressions to be evaluated in configurations. When used, this requires that Apache Commons Jexl be added as a dependency to projects using Commons Configuration. MapConfiguration now provides a way of controlling the trimming behavior. Added MergeCombiner to allow elements in two configurations to be merged when the element and attributes in the first file match those in the second file. File system access has been abstracted to a FileSystem interface. Two implementations are provided, DefaultFileSystem that behaves in a backward compatible manner and VFSFileSystem which uses Commons VFS to retreive and store files. PropertiesConfigurationLayout now allows setting the line separator to be used when writing the properties file. PropertiesConfigurationLayout now also stores the property separators used for the single properties. It is also possible to change them for specific properties or set a global properties separator. In earlier versions the separator was hard-coded to " = ". PropertiesConfiguration now defines a nested interface IOFactory. Using this interface it is possible to inject custom PropertiesReader and PropertiesWriter implementations. SubnodeConfiguration now fires an event of type EVENT_SUBNODE_CHANGED if a structural change of the parent configuration was detected. If the SubnodeConfiguration is contained in a CombinedConfiguration, the CombinedConfiguration receives this event and can update itself. MultiFileHierarchicalConfiguration was not using basepath to construct the file url. It also threw an exception if the file pattern resolved to a non-existent file. This is now configurable. Align interpolation functionality of SubnodeConfiguration and SubsetConfiguration. SubsetConfiguration will now also interpolate keys of the parent configuration or use the local lookups of its parent. SubnodeConfiguration is in turn now able to lookup local keys as well. Align interpolation functionality of SubnodeConfiguration and SubsetConfiguration. Align interpolation functionality of SubnodeConfiguration and SubsetConfiguration. SubsetConfiguration did not use locally registered lookups of its interpolator. Fixed broken links to the API documentation in the user's guide. Improvements of the user's guide for hierarchical configurations. The message of the ConversionException thrown by AbstractConfiguration.getBigInteger() is now correct. Added getConfigurations and getConfigurationNameList. Allow configurations to be validated using XML Schemas. Allow configurations to be validated using XML Schemas. Some dependencies to other Commons components have been updated to the recent versions. Affected are Commons Lang, Commons Collections, Commons Logging, Commons BeanUtils, and Commons JXPath. The older versions should still work. Allow system properties to be set from a configuration file. Allow variable resolvers to be defined configured in DefaultConfigurationBuilder. Added MultiFileHierarchicalConfiguration, DynamicCombinedConfiguration and PatternSubtreeConfigurationWrapper. The visibility of DefaultConfigurationBuilder.XMLConfigurationProvider was changed from package local to public. This makes it easier to implement providers that create configuration classes derived from XMLConfiguration. AbstractHierarchicalFileConfiguration.getKeys() now also checks whether a reload is required. AbstractFileConfiguration.getKeys() now returns an iterator that points to a snapshot of the keys of the configuration. This prevents ConcurrentModificationExceptions during iteration when a reload is performed. ConfigurationUtils.convertToHierarchical() now creates multiple configuration nodes for properties with multiple values. This improves compatibility with queries. PropertiesConfiguration now per default uses the encoding "ISO-8859-1" for loading properties files. CombinedConfiguration could cause a deadlock when it was accessed while concurrently a reload of one of its child configuration happened. This was fixed by reducing synchronization where it is not strictly necessary. The "force reload check" mechanism of CombinedConfiguration now also works with sub configurations created by configurationAt(). When performing interpolation the methods getList() and getStringArray() of CompositeConfiguration did not take the order of child configurations into account. This could lead to wrong interpolated values when the key was contained in multiple child configuration. Interpolation is now always done in the correct order. PropertiesConfiguration now also performs interpolation when searching for include files. This means that the name of a file to include can be determined by another property. DefaultConfigurationBuilder now supports defining new configuration providers in the configuration definition file. When converting a flat configuration to a hierarchical one it is now possible to specify the expression engine to be used for this purpose. This may be necessary if the flat configuration contains keys with special characters interpreted by the expression engine. CombinedConfiguration defines the new setConversionExpressionEngine() method. The expression engine passed to this method will be used when converting flat child configurations to hierarchical ones. XMLConfiguration now allows disabling the attribute splitting mechanism introduced in the 1.5 release (as part of the fix for CONFIGURATION-268). This may be necessary for correctly processing attributes containing both the list delimiter and the attribute delimiter character. The new property "disableAttributeSplitting" was added for this purpose. Made handling of parent nodes more consistent when setRoot() or setRootNode() of HierarchicalConfiguration are involved. Properties written through a DataConfiguration to a wrapped PropertiesConfiguration got lost when the PropertiesConfiguration was saved. This has been fixed. XMLBeanDeclaration now defines a factory method createBeanDeclaration() for creating the declarations for complex nested properties. This method can be overridden by derived classes for injecting custom BeanDeclaration implementations. A bug in XMLConfiguration.addNodes() made it impossible to add attribute nodes using this method. This has been fixed. INIConfiguration misinterpreted variables in the global section with a dot in their name as section names. HierarchicalINIConfiguration fixes this problem. INIConfiguration does not support obtaining a subset for the global section. HierarchicalINIConfiguration provides the getSection() method that returns the content of the global section if null is passed in as section name. INIConfiguration does not return the global section in its getSections() method. HierarchicalINIConfiguration fixes this problem. HierarchicalINIConfiguration adds support for line continuation. INIConfiguration has been deprecated. Its functionality is now available through the new HierarchicalINIConfiguration class. With HierarchicalINIConfiguration a complete new Configuration implementation for parsing Windows INI files is available. This new class is a full replacement of INIConfiguration and addresses some of its shortcomings. Being derived from HierarchicalConfiguration it offers the enhanced functionality of hierarchical configurations. ConfigurationDynaBean now works properly with indexed properties stored internally in the underlying configuration as arrays. The iterator returned by HierarchicalConfiguration.getKeys(String prefix) now also contains the prefix if this key is contained in the configuration. XMLPropertyListConfiguration is no longer limited to 32 bits integers. When an XMLConfiguration is created using the copy constructor, the name of the root element is now preserved. Changing the text of the root element of an XMLConfiguration had no effect when the configuration was saved. This has been fixed. CombinedConfiguration used to send two EVENT_COMBINED_INVALIDATE events for each modified child configuration. Now this event is sent only once after the affected child configuration was updated. XMLConfiguration now supports the xml:space attribute. This attribute can be used to preserve whitespace in the content of XML elements. INIConfiguration now preserves whitespace in quoted values. If a change has been detected by FileChangedReloadingStrategy, the reloadingRequired() method will now return true until reloadingPerformed() has been called. Fixed a NullPointerException that could be thrown under certain circumstances when saving an XMLConfiguration that was created using the constructor that takes a HierarchicalConfiguration. Instantiating an XMLPropertyListConfiguration no longer fails if the DTD is missing from the classpath. It's now possible to read a configuration file containing a '#' in its name (requires Java 1.4 or above). Fixed the date format for XMLPropertyListConfiguration. Some of the dependencies in the m2 pom have been updated to be more consistent. The dependency to commons-logging was updated to the current version 1.1. Older versions of commons-logging will still work. A new method interpolatedConfiguration() was added to AbstractConfiguration. This method returns a configuration with the same type and content as the original configuration, however all variables have been resolved. Resolving of variables with the prefix const (constant fields) caused a ClassCastException under certain circumstances if non-String fields were involved. This has been fixed. The dependencies to commons-codec and commons-jxpath have been marked as optional. They are not required by the core classes. There is a new configuration implementation EnvironmentConfiguration, which provides access to (OS) environment variables. On Java >= 1.5 this class can be directly used; on earlier versions a dependency to ant is required. A bug in XMLConfiguration caused that attributes of the root element could not be changed. This has been fixed. A new method registerEntityId() was added to XMLConfiguration, which allows to register URLs for entities. A new default implementation of the EntityResolver interface handles these entities automatically. The subset() method of HierarchicalConfiguration now takes the value of the subset's root node into account if it is not ambigous. Nodes added to a XMLConfiguration using the addNodes() method could lose their value when the configuration was saved. This is now fixed. New copy() and append() methods have been added to AbstractConfiguration. They replace the methods with the same names in ConfigurationUtils, which do not handle all features of AbstractConfiguration properly (e.g. list delimiters in property values are incorrectly treated). To avoid such problems, the new methods should be used. The addNodes() method of hierarchical file-based configurations now correctly triggers an auto save. HierarchicalConfiguration.addNodes() now resets the reference property of all nodes to be added. This fixes a problem with XMLConfiguration, which now detects the added nodes as new and treats them correctly when the configuration is saved. DefaultConfigurationBuilder will now notify registered error listeners about optional configuration sources that could not be created. Before exceptions thrown by optional configurations were swallowed ConfigurationUtils.convertToHierarchical() now correctly deals with property values containing escaped list delimiters. This also affects CombinedConfiguration when sub configurations with such property values are contained. AbstractConfiguration.addProperty() now correctly deals with list and array properties if delimiter parsing is disabled. The default expression engine used by HierarchicalConfiguration instances is now lazily initialized. This avoids NullPointerExceptions in certain server environments after a redeploy. Cycles in the JNDI tree no longer cause a stack overflow in JNDIConfiguration. The base implementation of clear() in AbstractConfiguration now checks for a potential UnsupportedOperationException when iterating over the existing properties. Using file-based configurations in auto-save mode together with a reloading strategy could cause data loss. This has been fixed. A PropertiesConfiguration that was created from a non existing file lost its content when it was saved. This problem has been solved. A new getSource() method was added to CompositeConfiguration and CombinedConfiguration, which returns the child configuration, in which a given property is defined. PropertiesConfiguration now supports escaping the escape character for list delimiters. PropertiesConfiguration no longer escapes the list delimiter on saving if the list delimiter has been disabled. List properties and properties containing interpolated variables are now properly saved by INIConfiguration. When delimiter parsing was disabled for XMLConfiguration, saving and loading the configuration accidently added escape characters to properties containing the list delimiter character. This has been fixed. It is now also possible to escape the escape character itself. The return value of FileConfiguration.getFile() is now always consistent with the result of getURL(). INIConfiguration uses the platform's specific line separator instead of the Windows line separator. INIConfiguration flushes the output at the end of a save operation. For hierarchical file-based configurations the auto-save mechanism is now also triggered if a subnode configuration is changed. In such a case the new event type EVENT_SUBNODE_CHANGED will be sent to registered listeners. ConfigurationInterpolator now also invokes the default lookup object for variables with a prefix that could not be resolved by their associated lookup object. A SubnodeConfiguration per default does not see certain changes of its parent configuration (e.g. reloads). With a new boolean parameter of HierarchicalConfiguration's configurationAt() method a mode can be enabled, in which the subnode configuration checks for such changes and reconstructs itself if necessary. byte[] properties are properly saved as data fields in the plist configurations (PropertyListConfiguration and XMLPropertyListConfiguration). DataConfiguration now supports java.net.InetAddress, javax.mail.internet.InternetAddress, and Java 5 enumeration types. Properties are converted to these types using the new generic getters. The object getters in DataConfiguration with no default value (i.e getURL(key)) now throw a NoSuchElementException if the flag throwExceptionOnMissing is set. Generic get methods have been added to DataConfiguration (get(), getArray() and getList()) XMLConfiguration used to drop attributes when an element's value was a list. This has been fixed. File configurations can now be saved to FTP URLs, or any other URL protocol supporting data output. Fixed a potential issue in DatabaseConfiguration where an error on closing a statement would prevent the connection from being closed. Date objects are now supported in ASCII plist files. XMLPropertyListConfiguration no longer requires commons-digester and commons-beanutils to work. Fixed INIConfiguration to handle the quoted values and the lines containing a value and a comment. MapConfiguration and the web-based configurations now treat strings that contain an escaped list delimiter correctly: The escape character will be removed, so that for instance "foo\,bar" becomes "foo,bar". DatabaseConfiguration now handles list delimiters in property values correctly. After cloning a XMLConfiguration there was still a connection to the original configuration. So when the clone was modified and then saved the content of the original configuration was written. This has now been fixed. Class loading in BeanHelper is now done using ClassUtils of Commons Lang. With ManagedReloadingStrategy a new reloading strategy for file-based configurations was added that can be triggered through JMX. The dependencies to Commons Lang, Commons Collections, and Commons Digester are updated to use the recent available version. However older versions will still work. A pom for maven 2 was added. ConfigurationUtils.getFile() now always checks first whether the passed in file name is absolute. If it is, this file will be returned. This prevents that on Unix under certain circumstances absolute file names are interpreted as relative ones. The dependency to xml-apis was changed to the version 1.0.b2. The so far used version 2.0.2 is reported to be bogus. In addition to configuration event listeners now so-called configuration error listeners are supported. These listeners are notified about internal errors that had been logged and swallowed by privious versions. The new enableRuntimeExceptions() method of ConfigurationUtils registers a special error listener at the passed in configuration that generates a runtime exception when an error event is received. AbstractConfiguration now allows to set an instance specific logger using the setLogger() method. This gives clients more control over a configuration's logging behavior. SubsetConfiguration and CompositeConfiguration were updated to fully support an instance specific list delimiter. Concerning splitting of string properties that contain a list delimiter character, these classes now behave like a "normal" configuration. Variable interpolation features have been improved. A variable can now have the form ${prefix:variableName} where the prefix defines the type of the variable. The standard types sys for system properties and const for constants are supported. Variables without a prefix are treated as references to other configuration properties (which is compatible to earlier versions). Commons Configuration now depends on Commons Lang 2.2. Some features of Lang's new text package are used. The number of dependencies needed for DefaultConfigurationBuilder was reduced by letting some of the default configuration providers resolve their classes per reflection. File-based configurations with a reloading strategy did not work well together with CombinedConfiguration because the reloading strategy is only checked when its associated configuration is accessed (which does not happen when only the combined configuration is queried). As a workaround CombinedConfiguration now provides the boolean forceReloadCheck property. If this is set to true, all contained configurations will be triggered when a property is queried. This will cause a reload if necessary. Configuration declarations in the configuration definition file for DefaultConfigurationBuilder that are marked as optional now support a new attribute config-forceCreate. If this attribute is set to true and the initialization of the configuration fails, DefaultConfigurationBuilder tries to add an empty configuration of the correct type to the resulting combined configuration. Before this change optional configurations that caused errors were never added to the combined configuration. CompositeConfiguration.clearProperty() now generates the correct update events. The configuration returned by HierarchicalConfiguration.subset() performed variable interpolation only in the keys that belong to the subset. Now the parent configuration is searched, too, to resolve the value of the referenced property. This is consistent with the way SubnodeConfiguration works. DefaultConfigurationBuilder now internally uses the standard expression engine for hierarchical configurations. So the dependency to Commons JXPath is no more needed when this class is used. Note that this change has some impact on existing code that manually sets properties before the combined configuration is created; this code must now be adapted to the changed syntax of property keys. HierarchicalConfiguration and some of its sub classes now define a copy constructor. A new configuration class for windows ini files was added. For file-based configurations loaded by ConfigurationFactory the load() method was called before all of the properties specified by attributes of the XML element have been initialized. Now load() is called after property initialization. Interpolation of non string values did not work when SubsetConfiguration was involved. This has now been fixed. The compatibility of ConfigurationDynaBean with other configuration types than those that inherit from BaseConfiguration was improved. The getList() method of CompositeConfiguration does now fully support variable interpolation. So it is possible to refer to a variable in one (sub) configuration that is defined in another configuration. XPathExpressionEngine used to create wrong keys for attribute nodes. This caused some operations on XMLConfiguration to fail when such an expression engine was set (e.g. reloading). Now correct keys for attributes are constructed. Some of the methods of file-based hierarchical configurations (e.g. subset() or configurationAt()) did not take an eventually set reloading strategy into account. This is now fixed by overriding the internal fetchNodeList() method in AbstractHierarchicalFileConfiguration and letting it always check for a reload. AbstractFileConfiguration now overrides addProperty() and setProperty() instead of addPropertyDirect() to implement the auto save feature. This was necessary to properly integrate PropertiesConfigurationLayout. It has also the advantage that an auto save is triggered only once if multi-valued properties are involved (before a save operation was performed for each property value). The new PropertiesConfigurationLayout class broke the save() operation of PropertiesConfiguration when an instance was newly created and populated in memory. This is fixed now by ensuring that a layout object is immediately created and registered as event listener at the configuration. ConfigurationFactory now supports variables in its configuration definition files. These variables are resolved using system properties and have the typical ${} syntax. There were still some problems with resolving relative paths when configuration files are loaded from classpath. This fix addresses these issues. DataConfiguration.getDateArray() used to ignore the format argument. This was fixed. PropertiesConfiguration now defines its own clone() method to handle the associated PropertiesConfigurationLayout object correctly. The dependency to servletapi was updated from version 2.3 to version 2.4, but version 2.3 will still work. A new class PropertiesConfigurationLayout was introduced whose task is to preserve the structure (e.g. comments, blanc lines) of a file loaded by PropertiesConfiguration. Each PropertiesConfiguration object is now associated with such a layout object. A saved properties file will look very similar to its original. clone() methods have been added to BaseConfiguration, AbstractFileConfiguration, MapConfiguration, CompositeConfiguration, and CombinedConfiguration. So the most important Configuration implementations now support cloning. To ConfigurationUtils an utility method cloneConfiguration() was added that allows to conveniently clone a configuration. If a configuration file was to be loaded from classpath, the constructor of AbstractFileConfiguration dropped the file's path. The path is now taken into account. The getter methods for numeric data types in AbstractConfiguration now support conversions between different Number types, e.g. you can now call getLong(key) when key points to an Integer value. The new class DefaultConfigurationBuilder was added as an alternative to ConfigurationFactory. It provides some more features and creates a CombinedConfiguration object The new class CombinedConfiguration was added as a hierarchical alternative to CompositeConfiguration. Support for low-level configuration events was added to all classes derived from AbstractConfiguration. The major part of this is handled by the new super class EventSource of AbstractConfiguration. A new method convertToHierarchical() was added to ConfigurationUtils, which is able to convert an arbitrary configuration object into a hierarchical configuration. Loading of file-based configurations no longer throws a NullPointerException in setups where the thread context class loader is not set. The dependency to dom4j was removed; it was only used by two test classes, which have been re-written. XMLConfiguration used to drop the DOCTYPE declaration when saving the configuration. It is now able to extract the DTD's public and system ID and write them back (more complex DOCTYPE declarations are still not supported). With the new methods setSystemID() and setPublicID(), the DOCTYPE declaration can be configured. Added two new constructors in CompositeConfiguration accepting a collection of configurations as a parameter. (Basic) Support for declaring beans in configuration files was added. Some new classes in the beanutils package allow to create instances from these declarations. The implementation of the interpolation features have been extracted out off AbstractConfiguration and moved to PropertyConverter. The interpolateHelper() method of AbstractConfiguration is now deprectated and will not be called any more during interpolation. A new method configurationsAt() was added to HierarchicalConfiguration that provides a convenient way of iterating over complex list-like structures without the need of manually constructing configuration keys with indices. A new class SubnodeConfiguration was introduced that wraps a configuration node of a HierarchicalConfiguration. All operations performed on this configuration use this wrapped node as root. The new configurationAt() method of HierarchicalConfiguration returns such a SubnodeConfiguration for a specified sub node. With XPathExpressionEngine an expression engine for hierarchical configurations is now available that can evaluate XPATH expressions in property keys. This expression engine implementation is based on Commons JXPath, which is now declared as a new dependency (but at runtime it is only needed if the XPathExpressionEngine class is used). The code for interpreting property keys was refactored out off HierarchicalConfiguration. Instead this class now supports pluggable expression engines (using the setExpressionEngine() method). So it is possible to plug in different expression languages. A default expression engine is provided that understands the native expression language used by hierarchical configurations in older versions. During the process of this refactoring some methods of HierarchicalConfiguration have been deprecated; they will not be called any more when searching or adding properties. These are the following: createAddPath(), fetchAddNode(), findLastPathNode(), findPropertyNodes(). A larger refactoring was performed on the inner Node class of HierarchicalConfiguration: A ConfigurationNode interface was extracted for which a default implementation (DefaultConfigurationNode) is provided. HierarchicalConfiguration.Node now extends this default implementation. The new ConfigurationNode interface defines some more methods than the Node class did originally for conveniently dealing with sub nodes and attributes. HierarchicalConfiguration now uses the new type ConfigurationNode whereever possible. Some methods dealing with Node objects have been deprecated and replaced by versions operating on ConfigurationNode objects instead. All configuration classes derived from AbstractConfiguration now allow to set an instance specific list delimiter. This can be done through the new method setListDelimiter(). As before it is possible to define a default list delimiter, which will be used if no instance specific delimiter is set. This can be done using the new setDefaultListDelimiter() method (the methods get/setDelimiter() have been deprecated). With the new setDelimiterParsingDisabled() method parsing of lists can be disabled at all. Commons Configuration now declares a dependency to Xalan. As with Xerces this dependency is only needed for JDK 1.3. It was introduced in a process of making Configuration buildable on a JDK 1.3. Documentation about the build process was also added. The dependency to Commons Beanutils Collections was unnecessary and thus removed. Commons Configuration now depends on Commons Digester 1.6 instead of 1.5. (This was done only to pick up the latest available release of digester.) ConfigurationDynaBean now implements the java.util.Map interface (as was stated in the javadocs). This was done by deriving the class from ConfigurationMap. The reload() method in AbstractFileConfiguration was updated to prevent reentrant invocation, which may be caused by some methods when they are called during a reloading operation. AbstractHierarchicalFileConfiguration, a new base class for file based hierarchical configurations, was introduced. XMLConfiguration now extends this class. XMLConfiguration now prints the used encoding in the xml declaration of generated files. In earlier versions always the default encoding was written. PropertiesConfiguration now always uses the platform specific line separator when saving files. PropertiesConfiguration now translates properly the escaped unicode characters (like \u1234) used in the property keys. This complies with the specification of java.util.Properties. ConfigurationConverter.getProperties() now uses the delimiter of the specified configuration to convert the list properties into strings. The interpolation of variables (${foo}) is now performed in all property getters of AbstractConfiguration and DataConfiguration. As a side effect the Properties object returned by ConfigurationConverter.getProperties() contains only interpolated values. PropertiesConfiguration now uses the ISO-8859-1 encoding by default instead of the system encoding to comply with the specification of java.util.Properties. JNDIConfiguration no longer logs an error when attempting to get a property that doesn't exist in the configuration. Attempting to load a configuration from a directory instead of a file will now throw a ConfigurationException. If a multi-valued property was involved in an interpolation operation, AbstractConfiguration created a string representation of the list of all values. This was changed to only use the first value, which makes more sense in this context and is consistent with other getters for single valued properties. If an include file with a relative path cannot be found in the base path, PropertiesConfiguration now also tries to resolve it based on its own location. Fixed MapConfiguration to store the list of values added under a same key instead of the last value added. Fixed a bug in the handling of relative file names in ConfigurationFactory: In most cases relative file names were not resolved relative to the location of the configuration definition file as stated in the documentation. This behavior was now changed to always be in sync with the documentation. This may have an impact on existing code which uses workarounds for the erroneous resolving mechanism. Empty elements or elements whose content consists only of comments or whitespace are now taken into account by XMLConfiguration. They are added to the configuration; their value is an empty string. XMLConfiguration now sets a valid system id in the InputSource used for loading files. This enables XML parsers to correctly resolve relative files, e.g. DTDs. getKeys() in HierarchicalConfiguration now returns the keys in the same order the properties were inserted. Commons Configuration now depends on Commons Collections 3.1 instead of 3.0 New configurations implementing the "property list" format used in NeXT/OpenStep and its XML variant used in Mac OS X. (PropertyListConfiguration and XMLPropertyListConfiguration) Resolved some issues with XMLConfiguration and properties containing the delimiter character. These properties are now correctly treated, escaping the delimiter will work, too. Added support for XMLPropertiesConfiguration in ConfigurationFactory. A <properties> element will generate a XMLPropertiesConfiguration if the filename ends with ".xml". PropertiesConfiguration now supports escaped key/value separators in the keys (i.e foo\:key = bar). PropertiesConfiguration now supports all key/value separators supported by java.util.Properties ('=', ':' and white space characters). Commons Configuration now depends on Commons Lang 2.1 instead of 2.0 Comment lines for PropertiesConfiguration can start with the '!' char (compatibility with java.util.Properties). Because ConfigurationUtils.copy() does not fully support hierarchical configurations a clone() method was added to HierarchicalConfiguration that can be used instead. XMLConfiguration now provides some support for validating XML documents. With the setValidating() method DTD validation can be enabled. It is also possible to set a custom DocumentBuilder allowing a caller to perform enhanced configuration of the XML loading process. AbstractFileConfiguration now always sets a valid base path if the configuration file could be located. This allows PropertiesConfiguration to resolve include files even when loaded from class path. Updated XMLConfiguration to correctly deal with properties containing dots in their names. Such properties could not be accessed before. PropertiesConfiguration's handling of backslash characters at the end of line was incorrect when there was an even number of trailing backslashes. This is now fixed. Fixed a problem related to file based configurations that are loaded from a URL which is application/x-www-form-urlencoded: the save() method would store such files at a wrong location. Updated FileChangedReloadingStrategy to use the file based configuration's source URL to find the file to watch. Before that it was possible that the strategy checked the wrong file. For configuration files loaded from a jar FileChangedReloadingStrategy now checks the jar file itself for changes. Finally a bug was fixed which caused the strategy to check the watched file's last change date on every invocation of its reloadingRequired() method ignoring its refresh delay. Thanks to Jorge Ferrer. Fixed a bug in the collaboration between XMLConfiguration and its reloading strategy: The configuration did not check its reloading strategy, so no reload was performed. Disabled auto save mode during PropertiesConfiguration.load(). Prior it was possible that the properties file to be loaded was immideately overwritten. Under certain circumstances it was possible that a reloading strategy set for PropertiesConfiguration interferred with the save() method causing the configuration file to be erased. This has now been fixed. AbstractFileConfiguration now stores the URL of the config file in the load() methods. This URL is reused by the save() method to ensure that the same file is written. XMLPropertiesConfiguration no longer depends on Digester to parse the configuration file, it's now implemented with a pure SAX parser. Fixed a bug which causes XMLConfiguration.save to lose attribute values under some circumstances. The clear() method now also ensures that the associated DOM document is always cleared. XMLConfiguration now parse the configuration using the encoding declared in the XML header instead of the OS default encoding. XMLConfiguration now uses the delimiter set by setDelimiter(char). Fixed a ConcurrentModificationException thrown when calling clear() on a SubsetConfiguration applied to a BaseConfiguration. The resolveContainerStore() method in AbstractConfiguration now works properly with arrays of objects and arrays of primitives. This means it is possible to store an array of value in the configuration and retrieve the first element with the getString(), getInt()... methods. Updated documentation for FileConfiguration's load() methods. Fixed a problem in XMLConfiguration with the output of the save() method when multiple files were loaded. Fixed a bug in FileChangedReloadingStrategy preventing the detection of a file change in some cases. Changed getXXXArray() and getXXXList() in DataConfiguration to return an empty array/list for empty values. Fixed getLongArray(), getFloatArray() and getDoubleArray() in DataConfiguration, the values were cast into integers. ConfigurationFactory now always configures digester to use the context classloader. This avoids problems in application server environments, which use their own version of digester. Thanks to Mike Colbert for the patch! Added a new configuration, XMLPropertiesConfiguration, supporting the new XML format for java.util.Properties introduced in Java 1.5. A 1.5 runtime is not required to use this class. Added a comment header to PropertiesConfiguration. The header is not parsed when the file is loaded yet. Added the setEncoding(String) and the getEncoding() methods to the FileConfiguration interface to control the encoding of the configuration file. Access to the top level element of the XML document is now provided. For newly created configurations this element can be changed before the document is written. Merged the two XML related configuration classes into one new class XMLConfiguration. This new class should provide the best of its ancestors. Replaced the PropertyTokenizer inner class in AbstractConfiguration with the split method in PropertyConverter. Also moved the method building an iterator on the elements of a composite value in PropertyConverter as toIterator(). Some cleanup of the handling of the base path in file based configurations. The base path is now always taken into account. Calling getProperties on a JNDIConfiguration no longer throws an UnsupportedOperationException. Removed the getPropertyDirect method from AbstractConfiguration, concrete configurations now implement directly the getProperty method from the Configuration interface. Added implementation of a save() method for HierarchicalXMLConfiguration. Constructing a file based configuration with a File no longer throws an exception when the file doesn't exist. Saving a configuration now creates the path to the file if it doesn't exist. AbstractFileConfiguration.save(File) no longer fails silently when an error occurs, a ConfigurationException is thrown instead. ConfigurationUtils.locate() now checks if the URL based resources exist. This fixes a bug preventing configuration files from being found if the configuration descriptor is in a JAR file (reported by Grant Ingersoll). Fixed NPE that were caused in the constructors of file based configurations if an invalid file name was specified. Added support for optional configuration sources in definition files for ConfigurationFactory. A new optional attribute allows to specify whether a configuration source is mandatory or optional. JNDIConfiguration.getKeys() now returns an empty iterator instead of throwing a ConfigurationRuntimeException when a NamingException occurs. The NamingExceptions are now logged. DatabaseConfiguration.isEmpty() now returns true if an SQLException occurs. Added two methods copy(Configuration, Configuration) and append(Configuration, Configuration) in ConfigurationUtils to copy properties between configurations. Moved the constructors implementations from PropertiesConfiguration and XMLConfiguration to AbstractFileConfiguration. Remove deprecated getVector() implementations. File based configurations can now be automatically reloaded when the underlying file is modified. Added a clear() method to the Configuration interface to remove all properties. Added a SystemConfiguration wrapping the system properties. ConfigurationFactory recognizes the corresponding <system/> element. Added a MapConfiguration to turn any Map into a Configuration. The getConfiguration() methods in ConfigurationConverter now use MapConfiguration, as a result the Configuration returned is always synchronized with the underlying Properties or ExtendedProperties, changes made to the Configuration are available in the Properties, and reciprocally. The "autoSave" feature of XMLConfiguration has been generalized to all file based configurations. Numeric properties can now be specified in hexadecimal format, for example "number = 0xC5F0". Fixed HierarchicalConfiguration.getKeys(String), it returned an empty iterator if the prefix string contained indices. Added a DataConfiguration decorator providing getters for all useful types found in a configuration (URL, Locale, Date, Calendar, Color, lists and arrays) Added 5 new configurations to be used in a web environment: AppletConfiguration, ServletConfiguration, ServletContextConfiguration, ServletRequestConfiguration, ServletFilterConfiguration. The getStringArray() method in CompositeConfiguration now interpolates the strings. SubsetConfiguration now shares the "throwExceptionOnMissing" property with its parent. Removed "file:" at the beginning of the base path when calling setFile() on a FileConfiguration. This prevented auto saving an XMLConfiguration loaded from a File (issue reported by Mark Roth). All NamingEnumerations in JNDIConfiguraiton are now properly closed (Suggested by Eric Jung). Properties added to an XMLConfiguration are no longer duplicated in the resulting XML file. Unified the mechanisms for loading and saving file based configurations. PropertiesConfiguration, XMLConfiguration and HierarchicalXMLConfiguration now implement the same FileConfiguration interface. BasePathLoader, BasePathConfiguration, ClassPropertiesConfiguration and BasePropertiesConfiguration have been removed. Replaced the calls to Boolean.booleanValue(boolean) in AbstractConfiguration and ConfigurationDynaBean to be Java 1.3 compatible. Changing the prefix of a JNDIConfiguration will now reset the base context used. The context used by JNDIConfiguration can be specified in its constructor or through the setContext() method. The context can be accessed with the getContext() method which is now public. Make the behaviour on missing properties for the get methods that return objects configurable. A property throwExceptionOnMissing can be set and then the getters throw an NoSuchElementException. The old default behaviour of returning a null value has been restored. Allow configurations extending AbstractConfiguration to change the delimiter used from "," to something else. PropertiesConfiguration.save() method has issues with preserving the filename Test cases for HierarchicalConfigurationXMLReader stores comments as text nodes. Clarify for ConfigurationDynaBean that the get method should throw an illegalArgumentException if there is no property specified. Fixed a ClassCastException when adding a non String property to an XMLConfiguration. Fixed the handling of attribute properties by HierarchicalConfigurationConverter. Fixed a ClassCastException thrown on adding a non string property in a DatabaseConfiguration. Bring back the getVector() methods in the Configuration interface. These methods are needed for "drop-on" replacement of the various pre-1.0 commons-configuration snapshots and are already deprecated. These methods will be removed for 1.1. HierarchicalConfigurationXMLReader stores comments as text nodes. project.xml contains bad dependencies. clearXmlProperty doesn't remove list properties completely. new ConfigurationDynaBean. new ConfigurationMap and ConfigurationSet. Problem adding property XMLConfiguration. ConfigurationXMLDocument removed until post 1.0. DatabaseConfiguration doesn't support List properties. Fixed a bug related to XMLConfiguration. Can't add a new property as an attribute in XMLConfiguration. Fixed a bug related to XMLConfiguration. XMLConfiguration doesn't support attribute names with a dot. Fixed a bug related to XMLConfiguration. XMLConfiguration doesn't ignore comments. Fixed a bug related to XMLConfiguration. XMLConfiguration.save() doesn't escape reserved characters. Added save methods in XMLConfiguration similar to PropertiesConfiguration to save the configuration to another file. Removed the DOM4J implementations in favor of the DOM ones. DOMConfiguration has been renamed to XMLConfiguration, and HierarchicalDOMConfiguration to HierarchicalXMLConfiguration. The elements parsed by the ConfigurationFactory have been changed accordingly. Added a save() method to PropertiesConfiguration and save(Writer out), save(OutputStream out), save(OutputStream out, String encoding) to BasePropertiesConfiguration. List values are now properly stored as comma separated values in the Properties object returned by ConfigurationConverter.getProperties() Introduced a ConversionException thrown when the value of a property is not compatible the type requested. It replaces the ClassCastException and the NumberFormatException thrown previously. Tokens like ${ref} in a PropertyConfiguration are now properly saved. The getList() method of a CompositeConfiguration now returns the list composed of the elements in the first matching configuration and the additional elements found in the in memory configuration. SubsetConfiguration returns a List on getList(). AbstractConfiguration wouldn't properly deal with a List, only with a Container for getList()! Thanks to jschaible for the unit test. Direct support of XML via DOM. New classes DOMConfiguration and HierarchicalDOMConfiguration. Update build to not include test configuration files in resulting jar. Refactored JNDIConfiguration to use AbstractConfiguration. Fixed invalid subsets by refactoring out the subset logic into a SubsetConfiguration. Reapply the ConfigurationXMLDocument that went missing during migration out of sandbox. Apply ASL 2.0 license. Thanks to Jeff Painter for scripting the conversion! Changed CompositeConfiguration to extend from AbstractConfiuration. This means that the behavior of CompositeConfiguration is much similar to others like PropertiesConfiguration in handling of missing keys, interpolation, etc.. Previously CompositeConfiguration had quite a few differences. Removed "defaults" from BaseConfiguration. Defaults are now done via using a CompositeConfiguration, either directly or via a ConfigurationFactory. if you want to save changes made to a Configuration, then you use a CompositeConfiguration and get back the inMemoryConfiguration that has the delta of changes. Added a bit of documentation on this. Enhancement: Configuration Comparator. BaseConfiguration: containsKey ignores default properties. I have changed it so that now the defaults are paid attention to. The Configuration interface now supports BigDecimal and BigInteger numbers. ConfigurationException is now thrown by public methods instead of Exception or IOException or whatnot. For configuration based on properties files, allow characters like \n etc to be escaped and unescaped. New DatabaseConfiguration that uses a database to store the properties. It supports 2 table structures: one table per configuration (2 colums key/value), one table for multiple configurations (2 columns key/value + 1 column for the name of the configuration). ConfigurationFactory now supports the hierarchicalDom4j element in configuration definition file Change all Vector objects to List objects. ConfigurationFactory now supports two types of properties files, additional and override. Additional properties add each other together. Override override each other. This allows you to have a single property that is either aggregated from a number of sources, or have a property that is overridden according to a specific order of sources. AbstractConfiguration addProperty now delegates to an abstract addPropertyDirect implemented by BaseConfiguration. Changed getString() method to throw a NoSuchElementException instead of "" if the configuration property doesn't exist. Added AbstractConfiguration to make it easier to create subclasses by only having to implement the methods required. ClassPropertiesConfiguration Additions: Use the classloader of class that is provided by the constructor. Add a constructor that indicates whether to use relative or absolute. Change getPropertyStream to utilize the relative or absolute flag. Add a test case that checks that absolute paths work. JNDIConfiguration.getKeys() Addition: The JNDIConfiguration.getKeys() method was returning an unsupported operation error. However, this is an important method to have supported. CompositeConfiguration.getKeys() Fix The CompositeConfiguration.getKeys() method was returning an unordered list of configuration values. However, many apps expect the order that keys are returned to be the order they are added into the properties file.