[jdom-interest] Reusable JDOM Elements

[Hallvard Trætteberg]

MessageConcerning caching sub-trees:
  in a potentially busy server environment, I preconstruct and cache
potentially many JDOM subtrees. Comes usage time, the subtree gets cloned
and attached to a real Document, which is subsequently output to XML and
sent out.

  It appears wasteful to have to clone the Elements, even if they are not
going to be changed, for the sole reason that they maintain a reference to
their parent.  It seems also to be slightly convoluted to manage recycling
of such subtrees.

  Is there a good pattern or solution out there (JDOM or closely related)
which allows me to build Document trees, which are only top-to-bottom
connected or which allows to reuse the constant subtree(s) easily?
The main problem with parentless JDOM elements is traversal, i.e. which
parent should you navigate to when going up in a tree. However, sometimes
your algorithm won't traverse upwards, which might be the case for
outputting XML into a stream. This depends on how XMLOutputter works. One
way is to make the traversing/visiting function map from an element to an
alternative one, and proceed with the alternative Element, something like:
- make a hashtable which maps from Element to Element
- build your cache of Element trees
- add leaf Element nodes to your document as placeholders for the trees
- put placeholder, tree pairs in the hashtable
- subclass XMLOutputter (if possible) and before outputting a child, include
something like
if (treemap.haskey(child)) child = treemap.get(child)

I'm not sure XMLOutputter is easy to subclass like this, but the trick at
least has worked for me in other cases. I've even included a map for the
other direction, so I can traverse the other way, from sub-tree to parent.

Hallvard



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