Is the email field required?

It is literally not required. However, since reseting password actually depends on it, i thought it would be a good practice if we emphasise users to always fill it

Required means we cannot save the user without it.

reseting password

I'm not sure I necessarily follow this. We don't (in the general case) have support for sending users email for password resets, though it's possible for a module to add this capability.

@ibacher I am simply trying to make sure that rest/v1/passwordreset can get working so that we can use it in the frontend
This PR might be followed by many more until this works

We don't (in the general case) have support for sending users email for password resets

I can see why you'd think this @ibacher , but in fact OpenMRS core does natively support sending emails for the "forgot password" feature, via the setUserActivationKey method: https://github.com/openmrs/openmrs-core/blob/master/api/src/main/java/org/openmrs/api/impl/UserServiceImpl.java#L760

Why don't you get the email field only for the platform versions that support it?

i was trying to avoid duplicating the code User.class.getDeclaredField("email") when; 1) determining if the platform version actually supports this field, and, 2) when i actually need access the email filed to set it

I have another way though. It might not be ideal though using OPENMRS_VERSION_SHORT

private boolean isPlatformTwoPointTwoOrAbove() {
   String platformVersion = OpenmrsConstants.OPENMRS_VERSION_SHORT.substring(0, 3);
   try {
      float versionFloat = Float.parseFloat(platformVersion);
      if (versionFloat>=2.2) {
         return true;
      }
   } catch (NumberFormatException e) {
      log.error("Unable to parse platform value text to float", e);
   }
   return false;
}

Why not just set the hasEmailField within this if statement?

Do we need the above variable? Why not just directly call the method in the if statement?

Aren't these exceptions thrown and caught within getEmailField?

I do not see any value added by the above comment.

Shouldn't this method return the email field value instead of the field object?

i would find it hard to reuse this method in handleSubmission if it was returning the value

Oh i see!