Trouble with circular singly linked queue

[somewierdguy]

I'm in the process of working on a lab and have hit a wall and can't quite figure out what's going on with this. The requirements are that I have a circular queue with one external pointer to track the rear of it. It seems to enque fine, however I keep getting null pointer exceptions when I deque and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. If anyone could help I'd really appreciate it.


Things fall apart with it in the dequeue method when it checks if it's empty since apparnetly it's not traversing properly and keeps hitting null.



public class CircLinkedUnbndQueue implements UnboundedQueueInterface
{
protected LLObjectNode rear; // reference to the rear of this queue

public CircLinkedUnbndQueue()
{

rear = null;
}

public void enqueue(Object element)
// Adds element to the rear of this queue.
{
LLObjectNode newNode = new LLObjectNode(element);
if (rear == null)
rear = newNode;

else
rear.setLink(newNode);

rear = newNode;

}

public Object dequeue()
// Throws QueueUnderflowException if this queue is empty;
// otherwise, removes front element from this queue and returns it.
{
//Error seems to point to this area//
if (isEmpty())
throw new QueueUnderflowException("Dequeue attempted on empty queue.");
else
{
Object element;
element = rear.getInfo();
rear = rear.getLink();

if (element == null)
rear = null;

return element;
}
}

public boolean isEmpty()
// Returns true if this queue is empty; otherwise, returns false.
{
if (rear == null)
return true;
else
return false;
}
}

[travishein]

if the linked list is to be cyclic, then when you have only one node in the list, you need to have it's next pointer, point back to itself right. ?

[somewierdguy]

yeah, I assumed I had that already coded, since before the dequeue operation it seemed to be spitting out whatever i put in?