Hst configuration, and most specifically XPage Documents their hst config can have components which have properties that reference a document. Typically this is stored in a ParametersInfo, for example:

public interface BannerComponentInfo {

    @Parameter(name = "path", defaultValue = "some/default")
    @JcrPath(isRelative = true)
    String getPath();

}

the above results in that the hst component in the CM gets to pick a document for property 'path'.

Instead of via ParametersInfo, it can also be achieved with DynamicComponentParameters in JCR nodes that a component can reference other documents.

Any component extending from BaseHstDynamicComponent do get any referenced document already set as model and thus also present in the PMA v1.0 as a primary citizen field of the hst component. However, the paramsInfo will still serialize the string value of the referenced document, which can be a absolute or relative path, for example

"meta" : {
        "paramsInfo" : {
          "path" : "common/contact"
        },
        "params" : { }
      }

This can be done better since 'common/contact' doesn't mean anything for an SPA developer.

It becomes even more important if we have old style components which do not get a referenced document set as model: then the content is simply missing in the PMA completely.

Hence, we opt for the following:

Desired output

instead of

"meta" : {
        "paramsInfo" : {
          "path" : "common/contact"
        },
        "params" : { }
      }

we want something like

"meta" : {
        "paramsInfo" : {
          "path" : "/page/u30092f4e2ef74c7286a58ce895908937"
        },
        "params" : { }
      },
...
...
...
"u30092f4e2ef74c7286a58ce895908937" : {
      "type" : "document",
      "links" : {
        "site" : {
          "href" : "/about-us",
          "type" : "internal"
        }
      },
     ....

note that ideally instead of

 "path" : "/page/u30092f4e2ef74c7286a58ce895908937"

we would have

 "path" : { 
          "$ref" :  "/page/u30092f4e2ef74c7286a58ce895908937" 
        }

but this is very hard since jackson is serializing a getter with a String return value, not a Map

Implementation Details

ParametersInfoUtils#createParametersInfo already has the notion of HstParameterValueConverter, which happens to always use the DefaultHstParameterValueConverter. If we extend that a bit to allow to inject a custom PageModelAPI aware HstParameterValueConverter, we can serialize parameters which are backed by JcrPath differently and make sue the referenced document gets serialized as well