most generic way to delete an element

[Richard]

Hi Jason,

I wonder what is the best way to delete an element without knowing its type?

I've tried a solution, which looks for the parents getContent() and returns this list as return value. The user than can invoke the remove method on this list. Does another generic method already exist in the framework? Otherwise we could try to add such a feature in docx4j?!

Here is my code:

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Using java Syntax Highlighting

@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
        public List<Object> getParentContent(Child child) throws DocxProcessorException {
                Child parent = null;
                Class<?> parentClass = null;
                Method contentMethod = null;

                do {
                        // get parent element
                        parent = (Child) child.getParent();
                        // get class info
                        parentClass = parent.getClass();

                        try {
                                // try to find a getContent method
                                contentMethod = parentClass.getDeclaredMethod("getContent"); //$NON-NLS-1$
                        } catch (NoSuchMethodException e) {
                                // parent gets new child
                                child = parent;
                        }
                        // if method was found or body is reached
                } while (contentMethod == null && !(parent instanceof Body));

                if (contentMethod != null) {
                        // invoke getContent at parent element
                        Object retObj = null;
                        try {
                                retObj = contentMethod.invoke(parent);
                        } catch (IllegalArgumentException e) {
                                throw new DocxProcessorException("Error invoking the getContent method of the parent.", e); //$NON-NLS-1$
                        } catch (IllegalAccessException e) {
                                throw new DocxProcessorException("Error invoking the getContent method of the parent.", e); //$NON-NLS-1$
                        } catch (InvocationTargetException e) {
                                throw new DocxProcessorException("Error invoking the getContent method of the parent.", e); //$NON-NLS-1$
                        }

                        if (!(retObj instanceof List<?>)) {
                                return null;
                        }

                        return (List<Object>) retObj;
                }

                return null;
        }
 

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[jason]

There isn't any similar method, and yes, we could add this.

My only concern is those cases where, owing to the bug in JAXB, getParent returns the wrong thing (see earlier posts). We might be able to identify these cases and throw an exception.