[jdom-interest] non-deterministic behaviour [eg]

[Jason Hunter]

Jools wrote:
> 
> Hi all
> 
> I'd like a little feedback as to what state we
> shoukd leave a JDOM object, should an update operation
> partially fail.
> 
> Below is the code for setMixedContent. I have a
> little concern with the exception thrown at the bottom
> of the for(;;) loop, please take a look;
> 
> My concern is this;
> 
> When setMixedContent is called we take it for granted
> that we will successfully complete the operation and
> the Element will contain all the right data, however
> should the operation fail the original data will have
> been lost as we clear the list at the start of the
> operation.
> 
> My worry is that this is non-deterministic behaviour
> as an Element could end up in a bit of mess should
> the above senario take place.
> 
> Would it be better to just ignore Objects which are
> not JDOM objects ? Or do we need to keep a copy
> of the original data before we commit to the new
> data, should some of it be non-JDOM classes ?

In this specific example, since setMixedContent() does a full content
replacement, it'd be just as efficient code-wise to keep the original
list data and restore it in event of an illegal add.  It seems a worthy
thing to do.

The trickier situation is the elt.getChildren().add(list) call where
you're modifying an existing list so you'll have to do a non-deep
clone() of the original list to keep its contents or pre-scan the list
being added.  That adds a performance hit always even though adding
wrongly typed elements is an edge case.  Hmm... Probably it's worth it
to do the clone() for consistency, and besides you don't generaly call
add(list) that often and specifically it's not used during the
time-critical build phase.

Maybe you could even be smart and do a clone() if the existing list is
short and do a scan-for-valid-first if the list being added is short.

Note that a Node interface wouldn't help here because someone could
still create a class Foo implements Node that makes no sense being added
to a document.

-jh-