SynBioDex/libSBOLcore — Issue #18: No way of setting precedes to null.
Author: Juul
Created: 2011-10-14 19:34:25+00:00
State: open

The 1.0.0 spec (RFC 84) has the following to say about the about the precedes property of SequenceAnnotation:

"Finally, a null value for a precedes property indicates the terminal SequenceAnnotation within a given DnaComponent. Absence of the precedes relation indicates this knowledge is not known."

While "absence of the precedes relation" could be taken to mean an empty array/list/collection (though this should be made more explicit in the next RFC), there is no way to set precedes to null since the only two methods for interacting with precedes are addPrecede and getPrecedes. Perhaps you have an array/list/collection with a single null value, but I'm pretty sure that's not what is intended.