Package org.biojava.bio.taxa

Class WeakTaxon

  • All Implemented Interfaces:
    Annotatable, Taxon, Changeable
    public class WeakTaxon
extends AbstractTaxon
    Deprecated.
    replaced by classes in org.biojavax.bio.taxa

    An implementation of Taxon that keeps only weak references to children, but full references to parents.

    This may be suitable for deriving memory-savy implementations of TaxonFactory.

    To manipulate the children set, use the getChildrenRaw and setChildrenRaw methods. These 'box' the actual weak reference, but recognize null to mean that there are no children currently known. A code-fragment may wish to do something like this:

    
 Set children = weakTaxon.getChildrenRaw();
 if(children == null) {
   children = new HashSet();
   weakTaxon.setChildrenRaw(children);
 }
 // do stuff to update child set e.g. add children

    Author:
    Matthew Pocock

    • Method Detail

      • getParent

        public Taxon getParent()
        Deprecated.
        Description copied from interface: Taxon

        The parent of this Taxon.

        Taxa live within a tree data-structure, so every taxon has a single parent except for the root type. This has the null parent.

        Returns:
        the parent Taxon, or null if this is the root type.

      • getChildren

        public Set getChildren()
        Deprecated.
        Description copied from interface: Taxon

        The children of this Taxon.

        Taxa live within a tree data-structure, so every taxon has zero or more children. In the case of zero children, the empty set is returned.

        ? read-only ? dynamicaly updated with taxon object ? copy of data ?

        Returns:
        the Set (possibly empty) of all child Taxa