Class Attribute

Clears the values in this Attribute and resets it to its default value. If this implementation implements more than one Attribute interface it clears all.

Shallow clone. Subclasses must override this if they need to clone any members deeply,

Copies the values from this Attribute into the passed-in target attribute. The target implementation must support all the IAttributes this implementation supports.

This method returns the current attribute values as a string in the following format by calling the ReflectWith(IAttributeReflector) method:

• if prependAttClass=true: "AttributeClass.Key=value,AttributeClass.Key=value"
• if prependAttClass=false: "key=value,key=value"

This method is for introspection of attributes, it should simply add the key/values this attribute holds to the given IAttributeReflector.

The default implementation calls Reflect(Type, String, Object) for all non-static fields from the implementing class, using the field name as key and the field value as value. The IAttribute class is also determined by Reflection. Please note that the default implementation can only handle single-Attribute implementations.

Custom implementations look like this (e.g. for a combined attribute implementation):

    public void ReflectWith(IAttributeReflector reflector) 
    {
        reflector.Reflect(typeof(ICharTermAttribute), "term", GetTerm());
        reflector.Reflect(typeof(IPositionIncrementAttribute), "positionIncrement", GetPositionIncrement());
    }

If you implement this method, make sure that for each invocation, the same set of IAttribute interfaces and keys are passed to Reflect(Type, String, Object) in the same order, but possibly different values. So don't automatically exclude e.g. null properties!

The default implementation of this method accesses all declared fields of this object and prints the values in the following syntax:

public String ToString() 
{
    return "start=" + startOffset + ",end=" + endOffset;
}

This method may be overridden by subclasses.