Notes on possible safe QPDFObjectHandle

Jay Berkenbilt
1 parent 52f1721e
Showing 1 changed file with 57 additions and 0 deletions
TODO
@@ -4,6 +4,63 @@ Documentation
 * See #530 -- add an appendix explaining PDF encryption in general
   plus how it's handled by qpdf.
  
+Safer QPDFObjectHandle
+======================
+
+Consider one of the following or something similar to make it possible
+to completely eliminate warnings from treating objects of one type as
+objects of a different type.
+
+Modeled after rust's Option type:
+
+```
+QPDFSafeObjectHandle soh = getObjectFromSomewhere();
+
+// QPDFSafeObjectHandle would be just like QPDFObjectHandle except
+// none of the type-specific methods would be there.
+QPDFDictionaryHandle dh = soh.asDictionary();
+if (dh.isValid()) {
+  QPDFSafeObjectHandle value = dh.value().getKey("/Key");
+}
+```
+
+More like typescript's narrowing:
+
+```
+QPDFSafeObjectHandle soh = getObjectFromSomewhere();
+QPDFSafeObjectHandle value = soh.getKey("/Key");
+```
+
+this would raise `std::logic_error` even if soh was a dictionary. But this would work:
+
+```
+QPDFSafeObjectHandle soh = getObjectFromSomewhere();
+if (soh.isDictionary()) {
+  QPDFSafeObjectHandle value = soh.getKey("/Key");
+}
+```
+
+In safe mode, we would have checkers (like we do now) but we would
+track whether a specific checker had been called and throw a
+`std::logic_error` if we call a type-specific method without first
+calling a checker. This means that code that passes the happy path
+still has to always do type checks, and this should completely
+eliminate type mismatch warnings.
+
+Migrating existing code to use this safe version would just be a
+matter of changing all occurrences of `QPDFObjectHandle` to
+`QPDFSafeObjectHandle` and making sure you had test coverage on every
+accessor/mutator method call. If you did and the code worked for the
+happy path, then you would be assured of never getting a warning about
+the a method called on an object of the wrong type.
+
+Implementation idea: maybe make a QPDFObjectHandleInternal<bool safe>
+template with QPDFObjectHandle as QPDFObjectHandleInternal<false> and
+QPDFSafeObjectHandle as QPDFObjectHandle<true>. We could then
+potentially specialize certain methods to reduce the overhead and code
+duplication without causing a change to the behavior of any existing
+code.
+
 Document-level work
 ===================