On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 11:40 PM, Robert Burrell Donkin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 9:01 PM, Markus Wiederkehr > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> 2) I believe it would be cool if a message Body could be shared >> between Entities. This would open the door for creating a structural >> copy of a message without actually copying the contents of text and >> binary bodies. Mime4j could become a more versatile API for >> manipulating messages. For example it could be possible to copy parts >> of an existing message and attach them to another message. > > cool, yes > > i suspect that there may be some wrinkles and either the API may need > revision, or the sharing needs to happen at a lower level. (this is a > comment, not a criticism - i'm happy to see the API improved) > > for example, ATM body has a parent property. how would you cope with that?
I was thinking about creating a new Body that shares the Storage object with the original. The new body can have a different parent. The Storage object can easily be reference counted by writing a wrapper class (Storage is an interface). But your reply made me investigate whether the parent reference could be removed entirely. As it is the parent is needed in two places. First in Multipart.writeTo() to determine the boundary string. And second in Entity.getMimeType() if the content type header field is not present (because the default value is message/rfc822 if the parent is multipart/digest, text/plain otherwise).. The first usage in Multipart.writeTo() is no problem if a visitor writes the message. The visitor can easily remember the parent entity. Unfortunately I see no way to eliminate the parent reference in Entity.getMimeType(). Maybe someone has an idea? Markus --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
