Java Hierarchy API - NetBeans API Javadoc 5.5.1

Javadoc

The elements of the Java Hierarchy themselves are found in org.openide.src. The package org.openide.src.nodes also provides node representations of them.

Overview and Use of the Java Hierarchy
Creating New Hierarchy Implementations
- Making classes findable
Creating Hierarchy Nodes
UML diagrams
- Basic Hierarchy structure diagram

Java Hierarchy API

The Java Hierarchy API is used to structurally represent the results of parsing Java source, introspecting Java classes, or otherwise gaining access to the source file / class / member structure of the Java VM.

Overview and Use of the Java Hierarchy

The basic feature of the Java Hierarchy is of Element and its concrete subclasses (you may want to look at the inheritance hierarchy). An element represents one point in the hierarchy, whether a source file, a class (or interface), a member (including constructors, methods, and fields), or an initializer block.

Element structure

The structure of the hierarchy is as follows:

At the top is a SourceElement, representing a block of code - either a top-level introspected class, or a Java source file. It is generally obtained from a data object participating in the elements hierarchy using a SourceCookie.
Source elements may contain ClassElements, which represent Java classes (or interfaces). The class elements directly contained by a source element are of course top-level classes, although classes may themselves contain inner classes (only named inner classes are represented in this API).
Typically a source element will only contain one top-level class, although the Java specification still permits additional package-private classes in the same source file (though this is deprecated in favor of inner classes).
Source elements may also contain Imports of classes and packages, though these have no element structure. Introspected top-level classes will of course not contain any imports, as this is meaningless, but source files may have them.
Classes may contain MemberElements, such as MethodElements, ConstructorElements, and FieldElements.
They may also contain inner classes (which are also class elements), as well as initializer blocks represented by InitializerElements; initializer blocks may be static or not, for example:
```
private static Thing myThing;
static {
  myThing=new Thing () {
    {
      init ();
    }
    public void doStuff () {/* ... */}
  };
}
```

The structure of multiple classes is not directly represented by the hierarchy - e.g., there is no element representing a package with source elements beneath it. Similarly, declared interactions with other classes is done by name - e.g., a class element may declare a superclass, but this is done by name, not by a link to another class element. However, in the case of class elements, it is possible to globally look up a class element by its class name, without concern for the details of how to find it. For example:

ClassElement clazz;
Identifier id = clazz.getSuperClass ();
String name = id.getFullName ();
ClassElement superclazz = ClassElement.forName (name);
if (superclazz != null)
  // ...

Besides the actual hierarchy of elements, particular element types have their own properties or sets of children beyond the list of child elements. For example, constructors and methods have an associated body of Java code (if taken from Java source); fields have associated value types, and methods return types; etc. A few classes in the API, such as Identifier, are used by elements, but are not themselves elements.

As a practical matter, it is undesirable for implementations of the element types to directly provide the full element interface, as there is a smaller set of core operations on the elements (getting and setting children and properties) together with a number of higher-level operations. So, all the element types (except for SourceElement) have a corresponding inner interface named Impl which specifies the most basic operations on that element type. Elements may be created either specifying an implementation object (and parent element), or with a default constructor which leaves the element initially unattached to any parent, and stores its child list and properties in memory. SourceElement, as it represents a topmost item, has no default implementation - if needed, an implementation based on its actual storage (e.g. a *.java file) must be provided.

In the standard IDE distribution's modules, there are two separate implementations of the source hierarchy. One is based on class files, and uses Java Reflection to create the structure; the other parses Java source files. Other modules may provide alternate source hierarchies - for example, a NetRexx support module could provide access to NetRexx program constructs in terms of the source hierarchy.

Modifications and events

All of the element types permit modifications to the properties of the elements and their children in the hierarchy, using writable JavaBean properties. Elements which are read-only (such as the obvious implementation of the hierarchy using Java Reflection) will simply throw SourceException to indicate they do not support modification.

All elements except SourceElement indicate their parent element using MemberElement.getDeclaringClass(), InitializerElement.getDeclaringClass(), and ClassElement.getSource(). Attaching a parentless element to a container element actually creates a copy of the child element, which will then indicate the proper parent element; the original child element's properties and subhierarchy will be copied to the new child, though the proper implementation (according to the parent) will be substituted. For example, to add a new method to an parsed-source class element:

// Get a class element from the system (say, a Java source file):
ClassElement ce = ClassElement.forName ("com.mycom.FooClass");
// Now make up a method with an in-memory implementation:
MethodElement me = new MethodElement ();
// Set its properties:
me.setName (Identifier.create ("getFoo"));
me.setParameters (new MethodParameter[] { });
me.setReturn (Type.INT);
me.setExceptions (new Identifier[] { Identifier.create ("java.io.IOException") });
me.setModifiers (Modifier.PUBLIC | Modifier.STATIC);
me.setBody ("return 5;");
// Add a copy to the class element, actually adding the method to source
// code if writing is supported by the element hierarchy implementation:
ce.addMethod (me);
// public static int getFoo () throws IOException { return 5; }

All modifications to the element hierarchy structure, or to the non-hierarchy-related properties of individual elements, fire property change events according to the Java Event model. The names of all required properties are available in ElementProperties; listeners may attach to an element using Element.addPropertyChangeListener(...). For example:

SourceElement src = ((SourceCookie) dataObject.getCookie (SourceCookie.class)).getSource ();
// Should also check for multiple top-level classes:
final ClassElement clazz = src.getClasses () [0];
clazz.addPropertyChangeListener (new PropertyChangeListener () {
  public void propertyChange (PropertyChangeEvent ev) {
    if (ElementProperties.PROP_METHODS.equals (ev.getPropertyName ())) {
      MethodElement[] newMethods = clazz.getMethods ();
      for (int i = 0; i < newMethods.length; i++)
        System.out.println (newMethods [i].getName ());
    }
  }
});

Accessing documentation comments

Individual elements in the source (methods, fields, classes) can be described, according to the JLS, by documentation comments. There's a class, which can be used to access comment contents (org.openide.src.JavaDoc) and which understands comments' internal structure (description text, tags, tag parameters). As already said, object of the JavaDoc class are mutable and changes made to them are written back to the source text at the appropriate place.
Individual Element classes have their specific methods for obtaining a JavaDoc instance for their documentation comments. They often return a specialized subclass of the JavaDoc class which provide better access to some tags specific for the given element type. You can use modification methods on the returned instance to change the comment contents. If you need to construct a new JavaDoc or JavaDocTag instance, you can use factory class JavaDocSupport to create instances of the JavaDoc interface. An example:

// MethodElement obtained from somewhere
MethodElement method;
// Print out the complete javadoc of the method.
System.err.println(method.getJavaDoc());

// Prints out the description text only.
System.err.println(method.getJavaDoc().getText());

// Adds a @throws tag to the method
method.getJavaDoc().changeTags(
new JavaDocTag[] {
    JavaDocSupport.createThrowsTag("UnsupportedOperationException", "blah blah"),
    JavaDoc.ADD
});

Element printing

There are two basic facilities for rendering elements as text.

Printing

All elements provide a way of rendering their contents as text, in effect recreating the Java source code that they might represent (stripped of comments and so on). The control logic which determines how they are to be printed resides in the element objects themselves, not in the pluggable implementations, so you may be assured of consistent formatting regardless of the origin of the source hierarchy implementation. (However, some pieces may be missing, for example Reflection-based implementations will of course generate empty method bodies, unless the implementation was built on a Java decompiler.)

External code may provide an ElementPrinter, which is essentially a set of callback hooks allowing the external code to receive part or all of the element structure. For example, an application that wanted to display the structure of a class with dummy method bodies might do so as follows:

// Make room to add code:
final StringBuffer buf = new StringBuffer ();
// Source element obtained from somewhere:
SourceElement src;
// Print it:
src.print (new ElementPrinter () {
  // Whether currently skipping over bodies:
  private boolean skip = false;
  // Print supplied text:
  public void print (String text) {
    if (! skip) buf.append (text);
  }
  public void println (String text) {
    print (text + "\n");
  }
  // Will not truncate any part of field declarations:
  public void markField (FieldElement elt, int what) {}
  // Snip out the bodies:
  public void markClass (ClassElement elt, int what) {mark (what);}
  public void markConstructor (ConstructorElement elt, int what) {mark (what);}
  public void markMethod (MethodElement elt, int what) {mark (what);}
  private void mark (int what) {
    if (what == ElementPrinter.BODY_BEGIN) {
      print ("/* body... */");
      skip = true;
    } else if (what == ElementPrinter.BODY_END)
      skip = false;
  }
  // Take out initializers altogether:
  public void markInitializer (InitializerElement elt, int what) {
    if (what == ElementPrinter.ELEMENT_BEGIN)
      skip = true;
    else if (what == ElementPrinter.ELEMENT_END)
      skip = false;
  }
});
// Get the result:
somehowDisplay (buf.toString ());

Element printers that only want the header, e.g., may throw ElementPrinterInterruptException in one of the mark methods to indicate that they have received all of the text they will need. This is a little more efficient, e.g., if it desired to print just the header of a class, and not waste time generating the following code.

As a shortcut, you may use Element.toString() to get the complete textual representation of an element, with all components intact. This just invokes a trivial printer and collects the results in a string. If only minor modifications to the default behavior are needed, DefaultElementPrinter provides the obvious default implementation that just prints everything, and it may be subclassed to refine this behavior.

Formatting

There is a separate facility for formatting just the header part of source elements, which provides control over the arrangement of the result (unlike printing, which only permits exclusion of basic parts of the element).

ElementFormat should be used as in this example:

MethodElement meth; // from somewhere
// e.g.: "public int getFoo (int type, String where) throws MyException, YourException;"
String theFormat = "{m,,\" \"}{r} {n} ({a,,,\", \"}){e,\" throws \",,\", \"};";
String prettyName = new ElementFormat (theFormat).format (meth);

This is used, for example, when creating display names for element nodes. The default formats for display names can be found in SourceOptions.

Hierarchy nodes

There is a standard implementation of node structure permitting the source hierarchy to be viewed (and modified) in the Explorer. The package org.openide.src.nodes provides the node implementations used for this purpose. Normally there is no reason for programmatic access to these nodes except by the actual creator of the nodes, as changes should be done using the elements themselves (and the nodes will keep their own display in synch with the elements).

Creating New Hierarchy Implementations

The hierarchy elements all have pluggable implementations which handle the actual interactions with the underlying physical Java source, class files, etc. The IDE's standard modules provide two such implementations, for classes with and without source. Also, the default constructors of all elements (except SourceElement) use a private default implementation which holds all information in memory. However, new sources of information for the hierarchy require separate implementation of the WhicheverElement.Impl interfaces.

To start, you should generally provide a hook from which other IDE components may access your hierarchy implementation. The general way in which this is done is to start with a data object that you create, and attaching a SourceCookie to it to provide the source element at the top of a class's hierarchy. If the data object is associated with an open editor, you may instead want to provide a SourceCookie.Editor so as to capture the correspondence - this will make it easy to find points in the source code referred to by the element or its children.

If you are in fact providing SourceCookie (or SourceCookie.Editor) from a DataObject, then you should also provide that same DataObject as a cookie from your SourceElement. This will permit the original file to be retrieved based on the elements, which are sometimes obtained through different channels.

The source element might create all of its children at once, or (preferably) create them lazily upon request. All elements except the source element should be created with the two-argument form of the constructor, passing in the parent element that is creating them, and the implementation of the element's functionality.

To create the implementations, you must implement the subinterfaces of Element.Impl (according to the type of element). The required methods common to all types of elements are:

Element.Impl.attachedToElement(...), called when the associated element is first created to inform the implementation of which element it is attached to. Some implementations may not need to pay attention to this, depending on the architecture.
Element.Impl.addPropertyChangeListener(...) and Element.Impl.removePropertyChangeListener(...) should keep track of listeners to property changes (if the implementation supports changes to elements at all). When any aspect of an element is changed - either its basic properties (such as value type), or its hierarchy properties (such as the list of methods in a class), a property change event must be fired to all listeners, using the property names specified in ElementProperties and the proper value type (e.g. MethodElement[]).
Element.Impl.getCookie(...) should provide any cookies that this element wishes to expose. No cookies are required, but special functionality could be added to the hierarchy: for example, ViewCookie could be attached to member elements to display Javadoc in the IDE's Web browser, if this functionality were feasible. Then view actions would be enabled when the element's node was selected in the Explorer.
Note that both elements and their node representatives automatically provide cookies for the element class itself, since Element is also a type of cookie. This may be used, for example, to determine if an arbitrary node represents an element of some sort.
Element.Impl.readResolve() must recreate some corresponding instance of the associated element after deserialization. Typically you will just want to call the two-element constructor of the corresponding element class, passing in the implementation and no parent element (i.e. null - it is the responsibility of the deserialization code to reconstruct the hierarchy), or the sole constructor in the case of SourceElement.
This method may not be required in a future version of the API, as it is possible to store the essential aspects of the source hierarchy without using direct serialization.

Note that all element implementations must be serializable to interact well with the IDE - for example, source elements substitute the implementation during serialization.

Particular implementation subinterfaces require more methods to be implemented, but typically these are self-explanatory. For example, ConstructorElement.Impl.setExceptions(...) should actually perform the work of changing the exceptions thrown by a class in the underlying real object, and firing property changes about it. Any of the modificational methods may simply throw SourceException if they do not support modification of that aspect of the element; read-only elements should just throw this exception on all write methods.

Some methods add new pieces of the hierarchy, and you must specially support this. For example, the implementation of ClassElement.Impl.changeClasses(...) must handle insertions into and removals from the hierarchy:

If any inner classes are being added, they must be copied to use your own implementation, as part of actually adding the inner classes to the represented storage. I.e., a new ClassElement.Impl object must be created for each added inner classes, using your own class element implementation but extracting all of its properties (name, etc.) from the externally supplied classes. You should not try to modify the supplied inner classes - these are only models.
Any existing inner classes to be removed should have their implementation deactivated or somehow destroyed - the declaring class should be the only "owner" of them, and they should not continue to work in isolation.
The above two points should be understood recursively. I.e., if an inner class is added that itself had some inner classes, these also should be recursively copied into the proper implementation, and the whole subhierarchy recreated.

Making classes findable

Very commonly, users of the Java Hierarchy will want to find the "proper" implementation of a part of the hierarchy in the case of classes. That is, class names are specified by many other components of the system and it is natural to want to find the ClassElement in the system (if there is one) which represents that class.

One way of doing this is to assume that the class in question is stored somewhere in the Repository, and to look through all filesystems, trying to find the folder corresponding to the desired package name, then looking through all data objects in each such folder for something providing a SourceCookie (you could just look for a file with the same basename as the desired class, but this might not work for classes embedded in another class's *.java file), then finding the right class child of the SourceElements thus obtained. But this is a fair amount of work and provides a number of failure points.

Instead, ClassElement.forName(String) attempts to find the right class element for you. This is done using callbacks - i.e. all modules which wish to provide a ClassElement.Finder will have done so using ClassElement.register(...). Generally, those modules which provide hierarchy implementations may also provide finders. For example, the standard Java source module provides a finder which does something like the job mentioned above, looking through the filesystems for *.java files with the right contents. The standard sourceless class module does a similar job for *.class files, and also permits you to find classes which are simply in the classpath, not the Repository (creating a "floating" element just describing the result of introspection).

If you are writing a module which generates element hierarchies including class elements, you should consider implementing a finder, and registering it in the module's installed and restored methods. Generally such a finder should only look for class elements created by the same module (although if it can just as easily find other module's class elements, it may). If you expect the finder to be used very frequently, and it would normally have to search through the Repository to find the class elements, you may want to try to cache the results using some sort of weak-reference lookup table based on class name.

Creating Hierarchy Nodes

Normally, when providing source hierarchies as part of creating a data object, you will want to also show the hierarchy under the node for your data object, either directly or indirectly. The API provides reasonable default implementations of these nodes (except for the source element, which has no default - you likely would provide a special implementation of this anyway, e.g. using the same node as your main data object).

Using the default implementation

Using the defaults is easy:

public class MyDataObject extends MultiDataObject implements SourceCookie {
  // other code here...
  // Actually create the top source element:
  public SourceElement getSource () {/* ... */}
  // provide the node for this object, complete with hierarchy:
  public Node createNodeDelegate () {
    Children kids = new SourceChildren (getSource ());
    AbstractNode node = new DataNode (this, kids);
    // Make FilterCookie available on the node, so the children can be rearranged by the user:
    node.getCookieSet ().add (kids);
    // Perform other customizations on the node now...
    node.setIconBase ("/com/mycom/MyDataObjectIcon");
    return node;
  }
}

Using a custom node factory

If you need to perform any sort of customizations on the hierarchy nodes, but want to reuse most of the implementation provided by the API, you will need to create a new ElementNodeFactory. Although it is not too difficult to implement from scratch, you may prefer to subclass DefaultFactory (so as not to have to handle creation of error and wait nodes, mostly).

Essentially, the factory methods should simply substitute your own subclassed (or externally customized) implementations of the various node types. For example:

class MyNode extends DataNode {
  public MyNode (DataObject obj, Children children) {
    super (obj, children);
    setIconBase ("/my/Icon");
  }
  public SystemAction getDefaultAction () {
    // provide some action to do something special with this source node...
  }
}
class MyFactory extends DefaultFactory {
  public MyFactory () {
    super (true);
  }
  public Node createFieldNode (FieldElement elt) {
    // Use the default impl, just make a trivial change externally:
    AbstractNode node = new FieldElementNode (elt, true);
    node.setDefaultAction (SystemAction.get (MySpecialFieldAction.class));
    return node;
  }
  public Node createInitializerNode (final InitializerElement elt) {
    // Actually use a specialized class:
    return new InitializerElementNode () {
      { super (elt, true); }
      // Support copy & paste of initializer bodies as text,
      // including between initializer nodes:
      public boolean canCopy () {
        // The default, but just to be sure:
        return true;
      }
      public Transferable clipboardCopy () throws IOException {
        Transferable basic = super.clipboardCopy ();
        ExTransferable extended = ExTransferable.create (basic);
        extended.put (new ExTransferable.Single (DataFlavor.stringFlavor) {
          protected Object getData () {
            return elt.getBody ();
          }
        });
        return extended;
      }
      public void createPasteTypes (Transferable t, List s) {
        super.createPasteTypes (t, s);
        if (t.isDataFlavorSupported (DataFlavor.stringFlavor)) {
          try {
            String addedBody = (String) t.getTransferData (DataFlavor.stringFlavor);
            s.add (new PasteType () {
              public String getName () { return "Paste initializer body"; }
              public Transferable paste () throws IOException {
                try {
                  elt.setBody (elt.getBody () + addedBody);
                } catch (SourceException se) {
                  throw new IOException (se.getMessage ());
                }
                return null;
              }
            });
          } catch (Exception ex) { /* ... */ }
        }
      }
    };
  }
}
public Node createNodeDelegate () {
  ElementNodeFactory myFactory = new MyFactory ();
  Children kids = new SourceChildren (myFactory, getSource ());
  return new MyNode (this, kids);
}

Customizing display

It is straightforward to customize a number of aspects of the display of the element nodes. For the most part you are advised to refer to the Nodes API for details on how to alter the appearance and user-oriented behaviors of the nodes; the default element node implementations set reasonable icons and display name, create properties according to the elements they represent, etc.

Filtering children

While it is certainly possible to manually specify the list of children which you wish to use for a container element node (either a source element or a class element), generally this is unnecessary as you may use either SourceChildren or ClassChildren to generate this list of children for you. The standard children implementations also automatically keep track of additions and removals in the associated element and update the node accordingly.

However, the default behavior of these children lists is to include all the children which are normally considered relevant, and to ignore access permissions. For some applications, this is inappropriate - you may want to provide only some children, in a particular order. This should be done using a filter on the standard children implementation.

For example, the following code creates a factory for a class node which only wants to display public or protected methods, fields, and inner classes (i.e., the "API" members).

final ElementNodeFactory factory = new DefaultFactory () {
  public Children createClassChildren (ClassElement clazz) {
    ClassChildren children = new ClassChildren (factory, clazz);
    ClassElementFilter filter = new ClassElementFilter ();
    filter.setModifiers (ClassElementFilter.PUBLIC | ClassElementFilter.PROTECTED);
    filter.setOrder (new int[] { ClassElementFilter.CLASS | ClassElementFilter.INTERFACE,
                                 ClassElementFilter.FIELD,
                                 ClassElementFilter.METHOD });
    children.setFilter (filter);
    return children;
  }
};

When you are creating a top-level node to represent a source element, typically there may be other children under that node besides the subelements of the source element. For example, the node representing a form in the standard IDE module has children (actually, just one) for the top-level classes in the source; but it also has a child node representing the AWT component hierarchy for inspection or editing. If you wish to add such additional nodes, you may do so, taking advantage of the fact that SourceChildren is a Children.Keys; just add your own children under whatever kind of key you like.

UML Diagrams

Basic structure class diagram

Java Hierarchy API - NetBeans API Javadoc 5.5.1

Javadoc

Contents

Java Hierarchy API

Printing

Formatting