BREAKING A CIRCULAR REFERENCE BETWEEN PARENT AND CHILD OBJECTS

摘要

Architecture that automatically breaks the circular reference between objects without any different logic by introducing a helper object called a child object container. The child object is contained within the container object and both share a reference counter. The parent object holds a strong reference to the container object. When adding a reference to the child object both the shared reference counter and the parent reference counter increase. When releasing a reference to the child object both the shared reference counter and the parent reference counter decrease. This approach provides a systematic way of solving the circular reference problem that does not rely on any weak-reference feature provided by the programming language.