A tree node may have at most one parent and 0 or more children. DefaultMutableTreeNode provides operations for examining and modifying a node's parent and children and also operations for examining the tree that the node is a part of. A node's tree is the set of all nodes that can be reached by starting at the node and following all the possible links to parents and children. A node with no parent is the root of its tree; a node with no children is a leaf. A tree may consist of many subtrees, each node acting as the root for its own subtree.
This class provides enumerations for efficiently traversing a tree or subtree in various orders or for following the path between two nodes. A DefaultMutableTreeNode may also hold a reference to a user object, the use of which is left to the user. Asking a DefaultMutableTreeNode for its string representation with toString() returns the string representation of its user object.
This is not a thread safe class.If you intend to use a DefaultMutableTreeNode (or a tree of TreeNodes) in more than one thread, you need to do your own synchronizing. A good convention to adopt is synchronizing on the root node of a tree.
While DefaultMutableTreeNode implements the MutableTreeNode interface and will allow you to add in any implementation of MutableTreeNode not all of the methods in DefaultMutableTreeNode will be applicable to all MutableTreeNodes implementations. Especially with some of the enumerations that are provided, using some of these methods assumes the DefaultMutableTreeNode contains only DefaultMutableNode instances. All of the TreeNode/MutableTreeNode methods will behave as defined no matter what implementations are added.
Warning: Serialized objects of this class will not be compatible with future Swing releases. The current serialization support is appropriate for short term storage or RMI between applications running the same version of Swing. As of 1.4, support for long term storage of all JavaBeans™ has been added to the java.beans package. Please see {@link java.beans.XMLEncoder}.
@see MutableTreeNode
@author Rob Davis
| |