com.thoughtworks.xstream.io.naming.NameCoder Maven / Gradle / Ivy
/*
* Copyright (C) 2009, 2011 XStream Committers.
* All rights reserved.
*
* The software in this package is published under the terms of the BSD
* style license a copy of which has been included with this distribution in
* the LICENSE.txt file.
*
* Created on 14. August 2009 by Joerg Schaible
*/
package com.thoughtworks.xstream.io.naming;
/**
* Coder between names in the object graph and names of a target format.
*
* The names form the object graph are typically names generated from Java identifiers (Java
* types or field members), but some names may also contain a minus sign. However, the original
* name might have already been aliased, so a wider range of characters can occur.
*
*
* The target names should satisfy the syntax of the target format. Transforming Java objects to
* XML this affects names that contain or even start with a dollar sign. Such names violate the
* XML specification.
*
*
* By default all names from the object graph are used as node names in the target format.
* Meta-data that is necessary to unmarshal the object again is typically written as attribute.
* Since such attributes might be represented differently in the target format, the NameCoder
* distinguishes between the names used for meta-data elements and the ones for the object data.
* The names in the target format might even have to follow a different syntax. Remember, that
* XStream can be easily configured to write also object data as attributes.
*
*
* Note that the instance of a NameCoder should be either thread-safe or implement {@link Cloneable}.
*
*
* @author Jörg Schaible
* @since 1.4
*/
public interface NameCoder {
/**
* Encode an object name for a node in the target format.
*
* @param name the name of the object data
* @return the node name in the target format
* @since 1.4
*/
String encodeNode(String name);
/**
* Encode a meta-data name for an attribute in the target format.
*
* @param name the name of the meta-data
* @return the attribute name in the target format
* @since 1.4
*/
String encodeAttribute(String name);
/**
* Decode a node name to an object name.
*
* @param nodeName the name of the node
* @return the name of the object
* @since 1.4
*/
String decodeNode(String nodeName);
/**
* Decode an attribute name to an object name.
*
* @param attributeName the name of the attribute
* @return the name of the meta-data
* @since 1.4
*/
String decodeAttribute(String attributeName);
}