I have once again corrected the post.

Good resolution for 2008: Create projects and compile (run?) before posting.

Actually, the idea was rather to make the method return the length of the object. It is quite common in Java to return a value even when it is not strictly required, since return values can easily be ignored. I here chose to return the length, because it may be a useful data, but another commonly used possibility is to return the new offset (the sum of argument ofs and of the length of the thing copied in the buffer). This is very useful to build long sequences of things.

I have corrected the code in the post.

You mention that the getter method is not declared public. The entry shows it is public. The next thing is that the getters have a return value (byte), but there is no return xx included. Since the content is copied to a byte array, there is no need for a return value. Should it not be:
[code]
public void getId(byte[] buf, short ofs) {
Util.arrayCopy(id, 0, buf, ofs, idLength) ;
}
[/code] ?