acessing & adding to data structure elements

[Graham Clark]

Hi,
hopefully this is an easy question:
if you create a data structure in java (eg, a linked list), how would you access a particular node and, say, change the data in it, leaving the rest of the data structure unchanged? So if you've got a linked list of 3 elements, like
47 -> 38 -> 24
how would you go about changing the 2nd element to 37? Assuming the code for the structure is something like

class Node{
Node next;
Integer data;
public Node(){
//create the object
}
public void insertNode(Node n){
next=n;
}
public Node getNext(){
return next;
}
}

If you were to use the getNext method, you'd get a copy of the second element rather than accessing the real second element, which isn't what I want.
Any help would be much appreciated.
thanks,
Graham.

[William Barnes]

Your Node class should only contain "node" stuff. A method like "getNext()" is a function on the list, not the node.
Strip down your Node class and make another class called "LinkedList" which makes use of the Node class. The LinkedList class would contain methods like "Add()" and "Next()".