Re: Collection implementations and fail-fast iterator problems.

From:
"Mike Schilling" <mscottschilling@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Sat, 3 Nov 2007 13:50:29 -0700
Message-ID:
<sa5Xi.45$3Z2.14@nlpi069.nbdc.sbc.com>
Patricia Shanahan wrote:

Daniel Pitts wrote:

Roedy Green wrote:

On Fri, 02 Nov 2007 14:06:09 -0700, Daniel Pitts
<newsgroup.spamfilter@virtualinfinity.net> wrote, quoted or
indirectly quoted someone who said :

I'd like to avoid having to keep track of "to-be-deleted" and
"to-be-added" elements, but I don't see an elegant way to handle
both those cases without getting a ConcurrentModificationError.


see http://mindprod.com/jgloss/iterator.html#REMOVE

The problem is that the element to remove isn't necessarily the
element that the iterator is pointing to. For example.
class ItemHolder {
  Collection<Item> items;
  public void doAllSomething() {
   for (Item item: items) {
    item.doSomething();
   }
}

class Item {
  ItemHolder parent;
  public void doSomething() {
    for (Item item: parent.items) {
       item.affectBy(this);
       if (item.shouldBeRemovedNow()) {
          parent.items.remove(item);
       }
    }
    if (shouldAddNewItems()) {
       parent.items.add(createNewItem());
    }
  }
}

This is the gist of what happens. As you can see, there are multiple
iterators to deal with.


A few questions:

1. Is the underlying Collection large? (That affects whether it is
reasonable to make a working copy).

2. Does it have to work with arbitrary Collections?

3. How should added items be handled? Should they be processed in
later inner iterations of the same outer loop? Should they be
processed in the same run of the outer loop?

4. Similar questions for deleted items, but that is a simpler problem
because of the option of marking an item to indicate it is not really
there.


There goes Patricia again, trying to actually understand the problem before
giving advice.

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