org.biojava.utils.walker
Interface Walker

public interface Walker

Objects that can walk over a filter expression, showing each element to a visitor.

Walker implementations are not guaranteed to be thread-safe. In particular, it is not possible to use the same Walker instance with more than one thread if the visitor has return values. Walker implementations can be re-used once the previous walk has been completed.

Author:

Matthew Pocock

For general use:

You should use FilterUtils.visitFilter to apply a visitor to a feature filter.

For advanced users:

You can use WalkerFactory.getInstance().getWalker(visitor) to get a walker that is suitable for your visitor implementation. This will take care of all the magic needed to hook up visitor call-back methods to the walkers traversal of the features.

For developers:

If you don't like the walkers that WalkerFactory produces, you can implement this directly. This will work fine for simple visitors, e.g., which only have a single method for visting all filters, regardless of type.

Method Summary

Object	getValue() If the visitor has a return value, then the result of applying the visitor to the tree can be obtained using this method, otherwise the result will be null.
void	walk(Object filter, Visitor visitor) This walks the feature tree, showing the visitor each filter in the expression.

Method Detail

walk

void walk(Object filter,
          Visitor visitor)

This walks the feature tree, showing the visitor each filter in the expression.

Parameters:

filter -

visitor -

getValue

Object getValue()

If the visitor has a return value, then the result of applying the visitor to the tree can be obtained using this method, otherwise the result will be null.

Returns:

the visitor's return value, or null