[jdom-interest] Moving elements

[Bradley S. Huffman]

Jason Hunter writes:

> 2) We could have a new method like this on Element and Document:
> 
>   List element.getContentDetached()
> 
> It would return a list of the detached content.  Then you could do this:
> 
> heading.setContent(anchorList.getContentDetached());

Definitely +1, but I'd just go ahead and name it removeContent().

> 3) We could change the add semantics.  David Flanagan suggested this,
> and it's how DOM does things.  If you add an element somewhere and the
> element already has a parent, the new parent just trumps it.  Compare
> that to right now we throw an IllegalAddException.  If we changed
> behaviors, it would make nice code:

Better documentation is also a solution :) But if the remove/add sequence is
not convenient enough, I'd prefer a moveContent(...) on Element instead of
changing the add semantics.

    heading.moveContent(textNode); // Move textNode to end of heading's
                                   // content list.

> heading.setContent(anchorList.getContent());

Hmmm, does that a) detach the content from anchorList or b) make
a copy of anchorList before setting heading's content.  It's not clear just
by looking at it. I like

    heading.setContent(anchorList.removeContent());

> Sorting works naturally also.  The big issue is whether you expect this
> sort of auto-detachment.  I guess I wouldn't, but maybe I've used JDOM
> too long.  :-)

I wouldn't either,  and besides

    List list = anchorList.removeContent();
    // do the sort
    heading.setContent(list);

is very clear about what is actual being done.

Brad