Apologies! I intended this to go to the list, it went only to Jakob.
- Thomas.
At 18:45 16/06/2001 +0200, Jakob Jenkov wrote:
>I can fully support having adds and also removes return a reference to the
>element added or removed!! You can always forget about the returned
>reference if you don't want to use it. James ??
Actually I'd prefer the return value to be the object _to which_ an item
has been added or removed: i.e.
=== AbstractElement.java ===
package org.dom4j.tree;
public class AbstractElement {
Element add (Widget w) {
// ... add widget to self
return this;
}
}
This allows me to do things like this:
Element complexType = new DefaultElement ("complexType") . add (new
DefaultAttribute ("mixed", "true"));
If the return type were the added object, the RHS would return a
DefaultAttribute, which is not what I want. The RHS currently evaluates to
void, which is _definitely_ not what I want :)
With the "return self" syntax, you can build quite complex but easily
understood trees without needing to explicitly declare every node (i.e.
without lots of "Element tempElement = ..." statements). For example:
Element complexType = new DefaultElement ("complexType") . add (new
DefaultAttribute ("mixed", "true"))
.add (new DefaultElement ("sequence")
.add ((new DefaultElement ("element") . add (new
DefaultAttribute ("ref", "xyz")))));
This matches the visual appearance (conceptual tree) of
<complexType mixed="true">
<sequence>
<element ref="xyz" />
</sequence>
</complexType>
The alternative reads something like:
Element complexType = new DefaultElement ("complexType");
Attribute complexTypeAttrib1 = new DefaultAttribute ("mixed", "true");
Element sequence = new DefaultElement ("sequence");
Element elementRef = new DefaultElement ("element");
elementRef.add (new DefaultAttribute ("ref", "xyz"));
sequence.add (elementRef);
complexType.add (sequence);
Having been doing this for the last couple of hours, I'd definitely prefer
the 3-line version to the 7 line version!
And as Jakob says, you can still do
add (new DefaultAttribute (...));
and disregard the return type.
What do others think? Hideous hack, or worth changing?
Regards,
Thomas.
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