An implementation of the document interface to serve as a
basis for implementing various kinds of documents. At this
level there is very little policy, so there is a corresponding
increase in difficulty of use.
This class implements a locking mechanism for the document. It
allows multiple readers or one writer, and writers must wait until
all observers of the document have been notified of a previous
change before beginning another mutation to the document. The
read lock is acquired and released using the render
method. A write lock is aquired by the methods that mutate the
document, and are held for the duration of the method call.
Notification is done on the thread that produced the mutation,
and the thread has full read access to the document for the
duration of the notification, but other readers are kept out
until the notification has finished. The notification is a
beans event notification which does not allow any further
mutations until all listeners have been notified.
Any models subclassed from this class and used in conjunction
with a text component that has a look and feel implementation
that is derived from BasicTextUI may be safely updated
asynchronously, because all access to the View hierarchy
is serialized by BasicTextUI if the document is of type
AbstractDocument
. The locking assumes that an
independent thread will access the View hierarchy only from
the DocumentListener methods, and that there will be only
one event thread active at a time.
If concurrency support is desired, there are the following
additional implications. The code path for any DocumentListener
implementation and any UndoListener implementation must be threadsafe,
and not access the component lock if trying to be safe from deadlocks.
The repaint
and revalidate
methods
on JComponent are safe.
AbstractDocument models an implied break at the end of the document.
Among other things this allows you to position the caret after the last
character. As a result of this, getLength
returns one less
than the length of the Content. If you create your own Content, be
sure and initialize it to have an additional character. Refer to
StringContent and GapContent for examples of this. Another implication
of this is that Elements that model the implied end character will have
an endOffset == (getLength() + 1). For example, in DefaultStyledDocument
getParagraphElement(getLength()).getEndOffset() == getLength() + 1
.
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 JavaBeansTM
has been added to the java.beans
package.
Please see XMLEncoder
.