Cloning a complex tree structure

[jay denzel]

Hi,
I am currently involved in a project were we implement a propiatory cgi c++ based web framework in java.
I have a page object which represents a html page containing special tags (not jsp tags).
The page object contains a tree structure of the actual html page.
I have a repository class in the framework where all page objects are held. Each time
a user makes a request for a page the framework picks the page object from the repository and
runs the runtime engine over it.
The problem I am facing is that I have to make a copy of the original page object in the repository
for the user to work with but could not find an easy or working way to do this.
Has anybody an idea how to solve this problem elegantly and most of all in a fast ( runtime that is ) manner.
Thanks for your helpful comments.
Best regards,
jay
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SCJP, SCJD

[John Smith]

Has anybody an idea how to solve this problem elegantly and most of all in a fast ( runtime that is ) manner.
One option is to recursively call clone() on the object, so all its data members are copied deeply (as opposed to a shallow copy)
Another option is to use what is equivalent to a copy constructor in C++.
In both cases, care must be taken so that you don't miss the references to mutable objects while copying the source.
Eugene.