Voters

Voters are used in Magnolia whenever configuration values are not assigned at startup but instead depend on rules. For example the Cache module has to determine if a requested resource may be cached or not. The rules to determine values should be configurable. The rules are user-defined using voters which evaluate established criteria by determining true or false of each rule. Voters are currently used for:

• Filter configuration: uses voters to determine whether a filter should be executed or bypassed.
• Cache configuration: uses voters to determine whether a file should be cached or not.

The basic concept of voters uses Voter classes which calculate an int vote value, where positive (1, 2, 3, ...) results are treated as "yes" or "true" and (0, -1, -2, ...) results are treated as "no" or "false". If you have a set of voters, then the result of a voting is the largest absolute result. If there are two voters with the same absolute result, then the one with the higher positive value will be taken.

Examples:

For most of the "real world" voters only boolean results make sense. These boolean voters return "1" for a "true" and "0" for a "false" result.

Voter examples

For further information see the voters package.