Question

hi i have this code to search a n-ary tree but it dosent works correctly and i dont know whats wrong with that
when searching n4 and n5 it return n3
whats wrong?

public FamilyNode findNodeByName(FamilyNode nodeName ){
       if(this.name.equals(nodeName.name)){
          // We found a node named nodeName, return it
          return this;
       } 
       // That's not me that you are looking for, let's see my kids

           for(FamilyNode child : this.children){
            if(child.findNodeByName(nodeName) != null) 
              return child;
                // We found what we are looking, just return from here
            //    return child;

       }
       // Finished looping over all nodes and did not find any, return null
       return null;
    }

Answer 1

The reason is because you give back the node in which a node was found. Once a node is found, this node needs to be returned, and the parent nodes in case a FamilyNode was found needs to return the found FamilyNode. Check what is done with the found variable.

You need to do something like this:

FamilyNode found = child.findNodeByName(nodeName);
if(found != null) 
    return found;

The entire method will look like:

public FamilyNode findNodeByName(FamilyNode nodeName ){
    if(this.name.equals(nodeName.name)){
        return this;
    } 
    for(FamilyNode child : this.children){
        FamilyNode found = child.findNodeByName(nodeName);
        if(found != null) 
            return found;
    }
    return null;
}