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It's a very common case when you keep a path in some property and you want to build a model based on a resource pointed by this path, e.g. you let authors configure references to some content and this reference is kept in property. To make reading of such referenced models easier, additional annotation @Follow was introduced - it allows mapper to map a resource by following a path stored under given property. It is possible to use this annotation in conjunction with with @Children as well.

Thanks to this you can make your code even cleaner. Check the following code snippets and see how Reportit has been simplified by use of the new feature.

// Now - with @Follow annotation
@SliceResource
public class ReportComponent  {
    @Follow
	@JcrProperty(value = "reportPath") 
	private ReportModel report; // this will build ReportModel based on resource path
                                // kept in reportPath property of current resource
	
	public String getReportValue() {
        return report.getValue();
    }
}
// Before
@SliceResource
public class ReportComponent implements InitializableModel {   
    @JcrProperty 
    private String reportPath;
    
    private ReportModel report;
    
    private ModelProvider modelProvider;
    
    @Inject
    public ReportComponent(ModelProvider modelProvider) {
        this.modelProvider = modelProvider
    }
    
    @Override
    public void afterCreated() {
        report = modelProvider.get(ReportModel.class, reportPath);
    }
    
    public String getReportValue() {
        return report.getValue();
    }
}

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Since Slice 4.2 you can declare which (in a component definition) a model class your component should use in a component definition. If you do this, you can simplify your JSP file and omit the slice:model tag. Slice will provide an expected model through JSP bindings and set a model object for JSP use.

For example, we you can define the following component's definition:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<jcr:root xmlns:slice="http://www.cognifide.com/slice/1.0" xmlns:cq="http://www.day.com/jcr/cq/1.0" xmlns:jcr="http://www.jcp.org/jcr/1.0"
    jcr:primaryType="cq:Component"
    jcr:title="Rich Text"
    slice:model="com.example.RichTextModel"/>

In such case, we you don't need to explicitly declare model in JSP file - it will be available out of the box, in a the JSP bindings object, like in the example below:

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To simplify the code even more, you can put put <slice:defineObjects/> somewhere in global.jsp include - it allows you to avoid "bindings" part, so above code, can be simplified as follows:

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This feature may also be useful for some more general solutions, where you can use newly-introduced method of ModelProvider: get(Resource) - this will return mapped object without specifying its class on code level.

For improved performance it's advised to upgrade AEM/CQ add-ons too. See details below.

Updated add-ons

The AEM60 add-on and CQ56 add-on have been updated to optimize reading of component definition so it's highly advisable to upgrade them too if you're upgrading from previous versions of Slice. They use AEM's ComponentManager which provides information about components with some nice caching. The updated add-ons include:

• AEM60 add-on - version 1.1.0
• CQ56 add-on - version 2.1.0

Throwing exception if fail to create injector

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Semantic versioning approach

We've introduce introduced full semantic versioning to in Slice, so you can be sure that all interfaces are semantically versioned and you can upgrade safely with each minor release of Slice.

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