gov.nasa.worldwind.Restorable Maven / Gradle / Ivy
/*
* Copyright (C) 2012 United States Government as represented by the Administrator of the
* National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
* All Rights Reserved.
*/
package gov.nasa.worldwind;
/**
* Restorable is an interface for describing the current state of an object, and restoring an object's
* state. Object state descriptions will be formatted as an XML document string. This allows the state description
* to be located in a file, reside in a database, or be passed over a network.
*
* The exact structure of the XML document is the responsibility of the implementation. However, to encourage data
* sharing between similar implementations, each implementation of Restorable should design
* restoreState to accept and ignore unknown structures in state documents. Otherwise, implementations
* should clearly document how they will behave when encountering an unknown structure.
*
* See the WorldWideWeb Consortium's (W3C) documentation on
* Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1 for information on XML.
*
* @author dcollins
* @version $Id: Restorable.java 1171 2013-02-11 21:45:02Z dcollins $
*/
public interface Restorable
{
/**
* Returns an XML document string describing the object's state. This state can be restored later by calling
* restoreState and passing the XML document.
*
* @return an XML document string describing the object's state.
*/
String getRestorableState();
/**
* Restores the object's state to what is described in the specified XML document string.
*
* @param stateInXml an XML document string describing an object's state.
*/
void restoreState(String stateInXml);
}