Destructor should be hidden too, since it is not allowed to delete a DOMNode, since it is owned by the implementation. You have to call release() to dispose of the memory.
class CDOM_EXPORT DOMNode {
...
public:
// -----------------------------------------------------------------------
// All constructors are hidden, just the destructor is available
// -----------------------------------------------------------------------
/** @name Destructor */
//@{
/**
* Destructor
*
*/
virtual ~DOMNode() {};
...
};
There is conceptual problem with the design/architecture, that 'the implementation owns all the nodes'. This makes it virtually impossible to implement a memory efficient implementation. A DOMBuilder will walk over the entire document. Imagine that a certain implementation does only create DOMNodes on the fly. Right now there is no way of telling if a user still holds a reference or not. A simple releaseRef() would probably help at least a little. My prior implementation which was done on Xerces 1.7, where I had my own DOMNode [to make it pure virtual] had the following concepts:
- Any pointer returned by any DOM function is owned by the user and has to be disposed of
- The real implementation can be shared amongst multiple objects, and reference counting can be used to keep track of expense memory
- This allows that a tree walker always only has all the nodes in the path to the root [since it is normally recursive] in memory, and all the other nodes [including of course attributes] can be disposed as soon as they are not used anymore. This keeps the overhead and memory footprint to a minimum.
I think the 'release' method is not W3C IDL defined anyway, and W3C does not defined anything about the memory management as far as I know. I know that I'm a little late with that, but I just converted to 2.1 and encountering the problem now, that everything stays in memory until somebody calls DOMDocument::release.
Systems Architect - Research Lab
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
