Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns

Chapter 8. Composite Pattern

<feature><title>In This Chapter</title>

• Understanding the Element Interface 103

• Understanding Leaf Elements 106

• Understanding Composite Elements 107

• Building a File System Example 108

• Summary 112

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The Composite pattern enables you to elegantly deal with recursive or hierarchical data structures. There are many examples of hierarchical data structures, making the Composite pattern very useful. A common example of such a data structure is one that you encounter every time you use a computer: the file system. The file system consists of directories and files. Every directory potentially has contents. The contents of a directory might be files, but they also might be directories. In this way, the file system of a ...