Re: Creating A Copy

From:

Lew <lew@nospam.lewscanon.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Wed, 02 May 2007 10:56:07 -0400

Message-ID:

<A6Gdne2fF4gVO6XbnZ2dnUVZ_gCdnZ2d@comcast.com>

Jason Cavett wrote:

Yes, I *could* hard-code in the copy. That is a solution, but

And should.

considering how many objects this tree-structure can hold, it really
doesn't scale very well and doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Declare an overridable copy( T ) method in the supertype for the nodes. There
is such a supertype, right? An interface?

Perhaps you can use clone() in an abstract superclass implementation, so that
it will work for cases where it will work, no need to override. If a subclass
can't use clone() effectively, write a detailed implementation for that class.

This is where I get stuck. It would be great if there was a way to
ignore certain things in the Serialization copy and keep others. But,
I haven't yet been able to figure out a way to do this. Do you have
any suggestions?

No serialization needed with a copy( T ).

I don't think there's any real magic bullet that gets you out of writing code
here. It is logical for a type to know how to copy itself, so it's code well
worth writing.

--
Lew