Presently we do not have a single Parser Factory that would take care of processing of all of the .properties files required to configure Confluence.

For example the {{ DefaultBootstrapManager.upgradeHSQL() }} simply loads the .properties files via 'FileInputStream' into the 'Properties' object as a hash table of 'keys' and 'values'. This seems very neat and efficient, yet we do not implement a specific error checking on individual entries. ( not always )

Hence, if in this example the confluencedb.properties file is corrupted for whatever reason (values missing), there is no notification provided of this corruption for the user. Instead you see a similar error as per the screenshot.

Say the 'version' tag is missing? Or is set to a 'string' ?

  Properties p = new Properties();
  String propertiesPath = homeLocator.getHomePath() + "/database/confluencedb.properties";
  p.load(new FileInputStream(new File(propertiesPath)));

  String versionString = p.getProperty("version");

  versionString = versionString.substring(0, versionString.indexOf('.') + 2);
  double currentVersion = Double.parseDouble(versionString);

This would generate a run time NPE exception which is not indicative to customer re the actual error in the confluencedb.properties file.

Proposed Solution:

• Use the .properties file parser to create a Properties object (as presently implemented)
• Add specific set of classes to handle each individual Properties objects (hash tables of the actual .properties file)
• Allow for i18n - create a separate or common error_message.properties files that would contain a specific set of customised exception messages (error message lib)
• Allow for resolving some of the corrupted configuration issues by correcting the invalid/null values and notifying the users about it too

Hence in the example above I could nicely use the lets call it ConfluenceDBPropertiesHandler.class - can think of a better name

...pseudocode...

 
-  create a new ConfluenceDBPropertiesHandler  call it 'handler'
-  pass the confluencedb.properties files to it
-  let it process it (notify errors, i18n, default corrective values ...)
-  call a valid() function on it or similar to get the status of the properties file (corrections would be performed within that class)
- if all good - proceed ... 

Hence if the version tag is missing, I could add it and print out notification of the error and correction too.