I have implemented a new feature in an open source project called Thaw.
Thaw is a tool to create documents with export to PDF in a text-concentrated working style. It offers a feature-rich and easy to learn markup language that you can write your documents in a human-readable way.
The maintainer of the project wanted to implement this feature which will expose a sub-command to clear the cache.
After doing some research on the project I found that there is a class called
CacheUtil which deals with the caching activities. So, a good solution would
be to add a function in this class to clean the cache directory. So, I added the
following function-
| /** | |
| * Clean the root caching directory. | |
| * | |
| * @throws IOException in case directory access failed or other errors related to IO | |
| */ | |
| public static void cleanCacheRootDir() throws IOException { | |
| try{ | |
| FileUtils.cleanDirectory(getCacheRootDir()); | |
| } | |
| catch(IOException e){ | |
| throw e; | |
| } | |
| System.out.println("Root cache cleaned successfully"); | |
| } |
I have used the
FileUtils
class of Apache Commons IO
library.
Now, I needed to add a sub-command clean in the command line options. Thaw
used picocli for building the command line interface. I
added the following function to implement the sub-command-
| /** | |
| * Subcommand to clean the cache folder | |
| */ | |
| @CommandLine.Command(name = "clean", description = "Empty the root cache folder.") | |
| int clean() { | |
| try { | |
| CacheUtil.cleanCacheRootDir(); | |
| System.out.println("Root cache cleaned successfully!"); | |
| } catch (IOException e) { | |
| System.err.println(String.format("Could not clear the Thaw cache folder: '%s'", e.getMessage())); | |
| return ErrorResult.ROOT_CACHE_CLEANING_ERROR.getCode(); | |
| } | |
| return ErrorResult.OK.getCode(); | |
| } |
In addition to the changes in the code, I also updated the THIRDPARTYNOTICE to include the attribution for Commons IO library.
After I am done with my changes I committed the change and opened a pull request.
There were couple of things that I worked with for the first time in the project. Thaw used Gradle as build tool. I used gradle for the first time. The project was organized using Java Platform Module System(JPMS). I have also used Jabba as Java version manager.