[Repast-developer] interesting copy question

[Skye Bender-d. <sky...@sa...>]

Nick, Tom,

So I'm doing some network stuff where I want to make changes to the
network (removing duplicate ties as preperation for stats methods)
without makeing changes to the actual node "Agents" of the model. 
Unfortunatly, methods like ArrayList.clone() only return shallow copies,
so any changes to the copied nodes will change the origial nodes.  Now
in my case, I can probably come up with a workaround:

1) modify the stat function to check the condition (very awkward, but
probably the least expensive)
2) since I am only interested in edges (and not the rest of nodes
properties), I can make a method which constructs a new network,
identical to the old one, but constructed from default nodes and edges,
and perform operations on it. 

However, there may be other cases in which people want to do things to
agents, without changeing the "real" agents.  I was thinking that we
should add copy methods to the existing node structures, and add
getCopy() to the Node interface, but this would break all existing
nodes, and still not insure that all relevent variables would be
copied.  Tom suggested creating a "copyable" interface and having the
abstract classes implement it...

Nick, do you know of any other way of getting deep copies of objects? 
(clone() is protected)  This would still be a problem for networks, as a
deep copy of a node would necessarily have to return the whole network,
as each edge contains nodes, which contain edges....

Something to think about anyway!

(in the meantime, I just won't let people work with multiplex networks!)
-skye