ElementPatchSpec

A data class describing changes on the properties of an file system element to be applied on behalf of a delegate file system.

A file system that adds specific functionality to another file system typically has to modify some attributes of file and folder objects obtained from the user or the underlying file system. This is problematic because the concrete type of the file and folder objects depends on the wrapped file system. Simply wrapping these objects to override some of their attributes would be incorrect, as the original objects might contain additional information specific to the implementation, which can no longer be accessed by the file system if the objects are wrapped.

As a solution to this problem, this class defines optional fields for the writable properties of files or folders that can be set to values that should override the original properties of the corresponding file system elements. A concrete com.github.cloudfiles.core.FileSystem implementation must be able to apply these patches to its own data structures.