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/* ====================================================================
Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with
this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
(the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
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http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.
==================================================================== */
package org.apache.poi.common;
/**
* This is an alternative to the {@link Cloneable} interface without its side-effects.
* A class implementing Duplicatable provides a deep-copy of itself - usually this is done via a copy-constructor,
* which is invoked with a self-reference by the copy method.
* References to child objects are duplicated - references to parents are kept as-is and
* might need to be replaced by the parent copy operation.
*
* @param the implementing class itself
*
* @see Copy Constructor versus Cloning
*/
public interface Duplicatable {
// Providing a generics interface Duplicatable> pushes too many
// changes to the implementing classes and the benefit of providing a subtype-specific copy method
// is not sufficient
/**
* @return a deep copy of the implementing class / instance
*/
Duplicatable copy();
}