Question

My job was to:

Revise the Node class to a generic one so that it can handle folders and files in a file system shown below.

And also:

First, you need to modify the Node class so that both ‘size’ and ‘name’ will be replaced by one object.

Now, I did the first part where we change the class to use generic types. I’m stuck at second problem. I don’t know how to pass single object instead of 2 variables and then do bunch of computation within it.

How would I substitute multiple variables for single object here? I’ve been trying to change types and move things around but my code keeps failing as soon as I remove those 2 variables.

Code:

class Node<T>
   {
   public String name;
   public int size;
   public Node<T> leftChild;
   public Node<T> rightChild;

   public void displayNode()
      {
      System.out.print('{');
      System.out.print(name);
      System.out.print(", ");
      System.out.print(size);
      System.out.print("} ");
      }
   }  // end class Node

Answer 1

I would redesign it like this:

class Node<T> {
    public T data;
    public Node<T> leftChild;
    public Node<T> rightChild;

    public void displayNode() {
        System.out.print('{');
        System.out.print(data.toString());
        System.out.print("} ");
   }
   . . .
}

EDIT One way to rewrite your find method is for it to find a particular T value:

public Node<T> find(Comparable<T> target) {
    Node<T> current = root;
    int comp = target.compareTo(current.data);
    while (comp != 0) {
        if (comp < 0)
            current = current.leftChild;
        else
            current = current.rightChild;
        if(current == null)
            return null;
    }
    return current;
}