having trouble with deep copying a CtElement in Scala

[krlu]

I would like to deep copy the entire AST of a CtElement, especially when I want to use parts of the sub-tree to create brand new CtElements

The Clone method available to all CtElement types are protected
I had this issue last year, see link below
#1978

Any help much appreciated!

[monperrus]

Which type of element are you cloning? What happens when you call el.clone()?

[krlu]

I'm using CtMethod
When I do method.Clone() i get the following issue:

Error:(199, 12) method clone in class Object cannot be accessed in spoon.reflect.declaration.CtMethod[Any]
 Access to protected method clone not permitted because
 prefix type spoon.reflect.declaration.CtMethod[Any] does not conform to
 object ProgramTransformer in package analysis where the access takes place
    method.clone()

I should mention, I am doing these operations using scala, not java.
Could that be a problem?

[krlu]

@monperrus any suggestions?

[monperrus]

The problem comes from Scala and is related to #2710. I'm not knowledgeable enough in Scala to fix it. But I'd be happy to merge a PR that makes the life of Scala users easier.

[krlu]

Ah i see, ok I'll see what I can do.
I'm happy to close this issue.

[krlu]

@monperrus

Hey I wanted to give an update.
While not ideal, I find that if I encapsulate the el.clone() method call inside a java class and invoke that java class in my scala code, everything works just fine.

While I'm too busy to package that up nicely and submit a formal PR, I suspect the best thing to do would be to create a java utility method (i.e. CtElementUtil) that contains a trivial clone method, shown below. Perhaps one of you guys can do that?

public static CtElement clone(CtElement originalCtElement){
     return originalCtElement.clone()
}

[monperrus]

that's a good idea!