Typed service properties with Felix fileinstall under Karaf
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In my Karaf container, I usually use etc/*.cfg files to configure my services. However, I inherited a service that uses metatype and expects one of the properties to be a Long instead of a String (it crashes on a string). What technique should I do to provide such properties?

I discovered one potential solution but I've gotten stuck. Felix has an alternative syntax for .config files that has a syntax like:

    key = type "value"

where "type" is a single-char code for the type (e.g. "L" for Long). I changed my filter to:

    felix.fileinstall.filter = .*\\.(cfg|config)

So far so good. Via the debugger, I can see that Felix is reading the file, but the resulting dictionary comes back empty with no error. (I can't easily debug because org.apache.felix.fileinstall-3.2.2-sources.jar lacks ConfigurationHandler.java, which is shaded from another jar...)

Am I going down the right path and I should just try to fix my .config syntax? Or is this a legacy syntax that I should avoid and use some other technique instead?