001/*
002 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
003 * contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
004 * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
005 * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
006 * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
007 * the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
008 *
009 *      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
010 *
011 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
012 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
013 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
014 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
015 * limitations under the License.
016 */
017package org.apache.commons.beanutils;
018
019import java.beans.IntrospectionException;
020
021/**
022 * <p>
023 * Definition of an interface for components that can perform introspection on
024 * bean classes.
025 * </p>
026 * <p>
027 * Before {@link PropertyUtils} can be used for interaction with a specific Java
028 * class, the class's properties have to be determined. This is called
029 * <em>introspection</em> and is initiated automatically on demand.
030 * <code>PropertyUtils</code> does not perform introspection on its own, but
031 * delegates this task to one or more objects implementing this interface. This
032 * makes it possible to customize introspection which may be useful for certain
033 * code bases using non-standard conventions for accessing properties.
034 * </p>
035 *
036 * @version $Id$
037 * @since 1.9
038 */
039public interface BeanIntrospector {
040    /**
041     * Performs introspection on a Java class. The current class to be inspected
042     * can be queried from the passed in <code>IntrospectionContext</code>
043     * object. A typical implementation has to obtain this class, determine its
044     * properties according to the rules it implements, and add them to the
045     * passed in context object.
046     *
047     * @param icontext the context object for interaction with the initiator of
048     *        the introspection request
049     * @throws IntrospectionException if an error occurs during introspection
050     */
051    void introspect(IntrospectionContext icontext)
052            throws IntrospectionException;
053}