Navigating Through Nodes

Note

The following discussion about paths uses a period (.) as a separator character. This is not always the character used, but it is a common way of denoting the next node in a path.

Let’s discuss how node paths work first. They’re just like file paths, a collection of nodes, separated by a single character, leading to the final child node that holds a value, whether that value be a normal value, a list, or simply another node. As an example, config.blockCheats.enabled is a path, leading to the node enabled, under blockCheats, which is under config. In a configuration file, this would appear like so:

config {
    blockCheats {
        enabled=value
    }
}

Moving Around

Tip

To make node retrieval easier (and to give less load on the system), it is advised to store a reference to the root node of your configuration file. This allows you to always be able to get the node using the full path, and avoids using the getPath() method, which is said to be a little intensive by official documentation.

Let’s start off by defining our root node again. We’ll be using a blank node to write on.

ConfigurationNode rootNode = loader.createEmptyNode(ConfigurationOptions.defaults());

The method to get a node from a node is the getNode(Object...) method. Note that Object... type for the parameter, as this means you cannot simply just give it a path like config.blockCheats.enabled. Doing so results in a config file like this:

config.blockCheats.enabled=value

... which is not the organized intended result we’re looking for. Instead, what you -can- do is split the path by the separator character so it ends up as separate arguments.

rootNode.getNode("config", "blockCheats", "enabled");

With that line of code, it should give us a ConfigurationNode object representative of the child node at the path of config.blockCheats.enabled. At that point, it is up to you what you want to do with it.