Avoid using arrays and work with List<String>

[bayrakta]

As I could not find any mechanism to extend a list, I am trying to build a list of strings and work with the result in several spots to loop on it. The main idea is building a comma separated list as string and then split it by comma. However, the split method returns an array of String and I am not able to iterate on it. (The only method which works with an array is the join method, which can actually only work on a result of the split method and I don't see any meaningful use case for it.)

I would propose the following options to enhance the scripting capabilities :

• Provide custom additional methods split and join, which work with List<String>, instead of using the ones from StringUtils.
• Alternatively, new additional method(s) might be introduced to extend an existing list, such as extendList(List<String>, String) and appendList(List<String>, List<String>).

Sample block when the method extendList introduced :

- DEF MY_SITE_LIST=[]
- FOR siteNode IN CHILDREN OF /content:
    - DEF siteName=${siteNode.name}
    - DEF MY_SITE_LIST=${extendList(MY_SITE_LIST, siteName)}

- FOR siteName IN ${MY_SITE_LIST}:
    - DEF siteGroupName="sample-group-${siteName}"
    - ${siteGroupName}:
        - path: "/home/groups/myproject/${siteGroupName}"

P.S.: Once the improvements prepared, the last block needs to be tested. As far as I remember, the changes on MY_LIST is only in effect within the outermost FOR loop. Outside of the loop, it remains intact. This causes code duplicates, as overriding a global variable within a loop is not possible.