[UIMA-5637] JCasUtil.selectAt has different meaning than expected

• Type: Bug
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 2.3.0uimaFIT
• Fix Version/s: 2.4.0uimaFIT
• Component/s: uimaFIT
• Assignee: Richard Eckart de Castilho
• Reporter: Mario Juric
• Created: 02/Nov/17 16:00
• Updated: 09/Nov/17 20:18
• Resolved: 09/Nov/17 20:18

Description

I was wondering what exactly the semantics of JCasUtil.selectAt is supposed to be after looking into the implementation, since the JavaDoc isn’t very precise. I initially thought that it would select annotations of the given type with the exact begin and end, but this is not the case when inspecting the implementation. The problem is in CasUtil.selectAt with the following while loop:

while (it.isValid()) {
AnnotationFS a = it.get();
// If the offsets do not match the specified offets, we're done
if (a.getBegin() != aBegin && a.getEnd() != aEnd)

{ break; }

it.moveToNext();
list.add(a);
}

I would have expected that either begin or end must be different to drop the item, i.e. "if (a.getBegin() != aBegin || a.getEnd() != aEnd)" instead. This is obviously not the case, and it does not have the same behaviour like selectCovered either, so what is the intend if it’s not a bug?