Named Representations Don't Work

This appears to be a case of dueling designs. The CustomRepresentation object appears to be based on a specification which describes the representation and is processed inside the CustomRepresentation; this processing was never written. The custom representation is invoked by ?v=custom:<specification>. The NamedRepresentation object appears to be based on a new representation which is coded in the resource in the same way a standard representation would be. There is no way to invoke a named representation.

I hijacked the code for custom to use it to involke named by adding the following after line 48 in RestServiceImpl.getRepresentation:

} else if (requested.startsWith(RestConstants.REPRESENTATION_CUSTOM_PREFIX)) {
return new NamedRepresentation(requested.replace(RestConstants.REPRESENTATION_CUSTOM_PREFIX, ""));

I then added the following code to LocationResource.getRepresentationDescription after line 100:

else if (rep instanceof NamedRepresentation) {
	NamedRepresentation nrep = (NamedRepresentation) rep;
	if (nrep.getRepresentation().equals("TATER")) {
		DelegatingResourceDescription description = new DelegatingResourceDescription();
		description.addProperty("uuid");
		description.addProperty("display", findMethod("getDisplayString"));
		description.addProperty("tags", Representation.DEFAULT);
		description.addProperty("parentLocation", Representation.FULL);
		description.addProperty("childLocations", Representation.REF);
		description.addSelfLink();
		return description;
	}
}

I then invoked the named representation by doing a get to a location with ?v=custom:TATER. It worked as expected.

I suggest that this be fixed by creating a new prefix "named:" which would enable the creation of named representations as above and leave the "custom:" prefix available for a run-time-specified representation description such as contemplated by the design.