org.apache.derby.iapi.sql.compile
Interface Visitor

All Known Implementing Classes:
CollectNodesVisitor, HasCorrelatedCRsVisitor, HasNodeVisitor, HasVariantValueNodeVisitor, ReferencedTablesVisitor, RemapCRsVisitor, ReplaceAggregatesWithCRVisitor, VerifyAggregateExpressionsVisitor, VTIDeferModPolicy

public interface Visitor

A visitor is an object that traverses the querytree and performs some action.

Author:
jamie

Method Summary
 boolean skipChildren(Visitable node)
          Method that is called to indicate whether we should skip all nodes below this node for traversal.
 boolean stopTraversal()
          Method that is called to see if query tree traversal should be stopped before visiting all nodes.
 Visitable visit(Visitable node)
          This is the default visit operation on a QueryTreeNode.
 

Method Detail

visit

public Visitable visit(Visitable node)
                throws StandardException
This is the default visit operation on a QueryTreeNode. It just returns the node. This will typically suffice as the default visit operation for most visitors unless the visitor needs to count the number of nodes visited or something like that.

Visitors will overload this method by implementing a version with a signature that matches a specific type of node. For example, if I want to do something special with aggregate nodes, then that Visitor will implement a visit(AggregateNode node) method which does the aggregate specific processing.

Parameters:
node - the node to process
Returns:
a query tree node. Often times this is the same node that was passed in, but Visitors that replace nodes with other nodes will use this to return the new replacement node.
Throws:
StandardException - may be throw an error as needed by the visitor (i.e. may be a normal error if a particular node is found, e.g. if checking a group by, we don't expect to find any ColumnReferences that aren't under an AggregateNode -- the easiest thing to do is just throw an error when we find the questionable node).

stopTraversal

public boolean stopTraversal()
Method that is called to see if query tree traversal should be stopped before visiting all nodes. Useful for short circuiting traversal if we already know we are done.

Returns:
true/false

skipChildren

public boolean skipChildren(Visitable node)
Method that is called to indicate whether we should skip all nodes below this node for traversal. Useful if we want to effectively ignore/prune all branches under a particular node.

Differs from stopTraversal() in that it only affects subtrees, rather than the entire traversal.

Parameters:
node - the node to process
Returns:
true/false


Apache Derby V10.0 Engine Documentation - Copyright © 1997,2004 The Apache Software Foundation or its licensors, as applicable.