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A specialized implementation of the NodeCombiner interface that constructs a union from two passed in node hierarchies.

The given source hierarchies are traversed and their nodes are added to the resulting structure. Under some circumstances two nodes can be combined rather than adding both. This is the case if both nodes are single children (no lists) of their parents and do not have values. The corresponding check is implemented in the findCombineNode() method.

Sometimes it is not possible for this combiner to detect whether two nodes can be combined or not. Consider the following two node hierarchies:

 Hierarchy 1:
 Database
 +--Tables
 +--Table
 +--name [users]
 +--fields
 +--field
 |    +--name [uid]
 +--field
 |    +--name [usrname]
 ...
 

 Hierarchy 2:
 Database
 +--Tables
 +--Table
 +--name [documents]
 +--fields
 +--field
 |    +--name [docid]
 +--field
 |    +--name [docname]
 ...
 

Both hierarchies contain data about database tables. Each describes a single table. If these hierarchies are to be combined, the result should probably look like the following:

 Database
 +--Tables
 +--Table
 |    +--name [users]
 |    +--fields
 |          +--field
 |          |    +--name [uid]
 |            ...
 +--Table
 +--name [documents]
 +--fields
 +--field
 |    +--name [docid]
 ...
 

i.e. the Tables nodes should be combined, while the Table nodes should both be added to the resulting tree. From the combiner's point of view there is no difference between the Tables and the Table nodes in the source trees, so the developer has to help out and give a hint that the Table nodes belong to a list structure. This can be done using the addListNode() method; this method expects the name of a node, which should be treated as a list node. So if addListNode("Table"); was called, the combiner knows that it must not combine the Table nodes, but add it both to the resulting tree.

Tries to find a child node of the second source node, with whitch a child of the first source node can be combined.

Tries to find a child node of the second source node, with whitch a child of the first source node can be combined. During combining of the source nodes an iteration over the first source node's children is performed. For each child node it is checked whether a corresponding child node in the second source node exists. If this is the case, these corresponsing child nodes are recursively combined and the result is added to the combined node. This method implements the checks whether such a recursive combination is possible. The actual implementation tests the following conditions:

• In both the first and the second source node there is only one child node with the given name (no list structures).
• The given name is not in the list of known list nodes, i.e. it was not passed to the addListNode() method.
• None of these matching child nodes has a value.

If all of these tests are successfull, the matching child node of the second source node is returned. Otherwise the result is null.