We currently have some level of support for importing/exporting nodes in a Java .properties format. It's mostly used (and useful) in tests.

This might be redundant with the NodeBuilder API. Let's decide on this and update this issue.

Below is a proposal to make this format more consistent. (I now prefer a /path/to/node.property syntax, but there was probably a reason for which we decided against it, maybe simply to help support dots in node names)

-See TODOs in MockUtil : we should make the "properties" format used to create MockHierarchyManagers simpler (there are currently several inconsistent ways of creating node properties for instance)-

After a quick discussion, we came up with the following syntax. We tried to be consistent, non-intrusive and non-ambiguous.

/path/to/node@                      create empty node if it does not exist - default type if not specified via other line, unspecified UUID if not specified via other line
/path/to/node@uuid=some-uuid        specifies UUID - create empty node if it does not exist, default type if not specified via other line
/path/to/node@type=foo:bar          specifies NT - create empty node if it does not exist, unspecified UUID if not specified via other property
/path/to/node/property=value        default property type - create node if it does not exist - default node type if not specified
/path/to/node/property#date=value   specified property type and conversion - create node if it does not exist - default node type if not specified
/path/to/node/property#string=      empty string property - create node if it does not exist - default node type if not specified
/path/to/node/property#             empty string property - create node if it does not exist - default node type if not specified

We'll have to cleanup our current tests, obviously, but since this is not something that will affect running systems (only poor developers who decide to switch their dev project to 4.3), we'll drop the support for the old syntax right away.