Children of org.eclipse.jdt.core.dom.ASTNode

Question

Using Eclise JDT, I need to retrieve the children of any ASTNode. Is there a utility method somewhere that I could use ?

The only way I can think of right now is to

Answer 1

We can retrieve the children as an ASTNode List using the API of :

ASTNode.getStructureProperty(StructuralPropertyDescriptor property)

It returns the value of the given structural property for this node. The value returned depends on the kind of property:

SimplePropertyDescriptor - the value of the given simple property, or null if none; primitive values are "boxed"
ChildPropertyDescriptor - the child node (type ASTNode), or null if none
ChildListPropertyDescriptor - the list (element type: ASTNode)

However, the ChildListPropertyDescripor is not intended to be instantiated by clients. You can refer to my code to get the list of children:

public static List getChildren(ASTNode node) {
    List children = new ArrayList();
    List list = node.structuralPropertiesForType();
    for (int i = 0; i < list.size(); i++) {
        Object child = node.getStructuralProperty((StructuralPropertyDescriptor)list.get(i));
        if (child instanceof ASTNode) {
            children.add((ASTNode) child);
        }
    }
    return children;
}