Mutability of collections returned by EntityGraph API

Nobody has claimed this yet.

The List/Map getter methods (e.g. getAttributeNodes()) on EntityGraph, AttributeNode, and Subgraph do not specify whether the List/Map returned is a mutable one or a copy. They should be specified as returning the exact collections so the collections can be mutated. If it is a copy then the ability to mutate an existing named entity graph using createEntityGraph(String) is quite limited. There would be no way to remove an attribute node or a subgraph, or for that matter even add a subgraph for an existing attribute node.

The alternative to returning the actual collections is to add methods to the API to enable the additional mutating operations.

Start with the EntityGraph, AttributeNode, and Subgraph getter API declarations, especially methods such as getAttributeNodes(). Review how the API should support mutating existing named graphs created with createEntityGraph(String), including removing nodes and adding subgraphs. Done means the collection behavior is specified clearly or the required mutating operations are defined.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.