1 /*
2 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
3 * contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with
4 * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
5 * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
6 * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
7 * the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
8 *
9 * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
10 *
11 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
12 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
13 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
14 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
15 * limitations under the License.
16 */
17 package org.apache.commons.beanutils;
18
19 import java.beans.IntrospectionException;
20
21 /**
22 * <p>
23 * Definition of an interface for components that can perform introspection on
24 * bean classes.
25 * </p>
26 * <p>
27 * Before {@link PropertyUtils} can be used for interaction with a specific Java
28 * class, the class's properties have to be determined. This is called
29 * <em>introspection</em> and is initiated automatically on demand.
30 * <code>PropertyUtils</code> does not perform introspection on its own, but
31 * delegates this task to one or more objects implementing this interface. This
32 * makes it possible to customize introspection which may be useful for certain
33 * code bases using non-standard conventions for accessing properties.
34 * </p>
35 *
36 * @version $Id$
37 * @since 1.9
38 */
39 public interface BeanIntrospector {
40 /**
41 * Performs introspection on a Java class. The current class to be inspected
42 * can be queried from the passed in <code>IntrospectionContext</code>
43 * object. A typical implementation has to obtain this class, determine its
44 * properties according to the rules it implements, and add them to the
45 * passed in context object.
46 *
47 * @param icontext the context object for interaction with the initiator of
48 * the introspection request
49 * @throws IntrospectionException if an error occurs during introspection
50 */
51 void introspect(IntrospectionContext icontext)
52 throws IntrospectionException;
53 }