Making Things Easy

Sometimes you just need a little refactoring and time to solve an issue. In JRDF you used to have to do the following to remove triples as a result of find:

iter = graph.find(ANY_SUBJECT_NODE, ANY_PREDICATE_NODE, ANY_OBJECT_NODE);
while (iter.hasNext()) {
 iter.next();
 iter.remove();
}

What users really wanted to do but couldn't because it would throw a ConcurrentModificationException is:

ClosableIterator iterator = graph.find(ANY_SUBJECT_NODE, ANY_PREDICATE_NODE, ANY_OBJECT_NODE);
graph.remove(iterator);

By putting this first bit of code inside of the remove(Iterator) method the operation can then be performed much more simply by the user. The only implementation issue was determining whether the iterator was from the source graph or not.

For some reason, this solution did not present itself before - I'm putting it down to the code being more consistent (mainly the implementation of the iterators). The main reason has to be though that someone asked the question, again, why did it need to be so complicated.

It seems very similar to the situations I increasingly find when you combine TDD, 100% code coverage, zero duplication and reflecting on the design. The solutions just seem to fall out a lot more easily.