An Extent is a logical view of all persistent instances of a given persistence-capable class, possibly including subclasses. Extents are obtained from PersistenceManagers, and are usually used to specify the candidate objects to a Query.

	Note
	Kodo extends the standard Extent with the KodoExtent interface to provide additional functionality. You can cast any Extent in Kodo to a KodoExtent.

public Class getCandidateClass ();
public boolean hasSubclasses ();

The getCandidateClass method returns the persistence-capable class of the Extent's instances. The hasSubclasses method indicates whether instances of subclasses are part of the Extent as well.

public FetchPlan getFetchPlan ();

Before iterating an Extent, you may want to use the FetchPlan to optimize which fields and relations of the returned objects will be loaded, and to configure result scrolling. See Chapter 12, FetchPlan for details on the FetchPlan interface.

When you create an Extent with PersistenceManager.getExtent, the Extent's FetchPlan is initialized to the same values as the plan of its owning PersistenceManager. Subsequent changes to the Extent's FetchPlan, however, will not affect the PersistenceManager's plan.

public Iterator iterator ();
public void close (Iterator itr);
public void closeAll ();

You can obtain an iterator over every object in an Extent using the iterator method. The iterators used by some implementations might consume datastore resources; therefore, you should always close an Extent's iterators as soon as you are done with them. You can close an individual iterator by passing it to the close method, or all open iterators at once with closeAll.

Note

Kodo may use scrollable JDBC ResultSets when large data sets are being iterated. Combined with Kodo's memory-sensitive data structures, this allows you to efficiently iterate over huge data sets - even when the entire data set could not possibly fit into memory at once. These scrollable results consume database resources, however, so you are strongly encouraged to close your iterators when you are through with them. If they are not closed immediately, they will be closed when they are garbage collected by the JVM.

PersistenceManager pm = ...;

Extent mags = pm.getExtent (Magazine.class, true);
Iterator itr = employees.iterator ();
while (itr.hasNext ())
    processMagazine ((Magazine) itr.next ());
mags.close (itr);