package org.apache.commons.ognl;

 /*

  * 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 the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at

  *

  *   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.

  */

 import java.util.Enumeration;

 /**

  * This interface defines a method for getting the "elements" of an object, which means any objects that naturally would

  * be considered to be contained by the object. So for a collection, you would expect this method to return all the

  * objects in that collection; while for an ordinary object you would expect this method to return just that object.

  * <p>

  * An implementation of this interface will often require that its target objects all be of some particular type. For

  * example, the MapElementsAccessor class requires that its targets all implement the Map interface.

  * 

  * @author Luke Blanshard (blanshlu@netscape.net)

  * @author Drew Davidson (drew@ognl.org)

  */

 public interface ElementsAccessor

 {

     /**

      * Returns an iterator over the elements of the given target object.

      * 

      * @param target the object to get the elements of

      * @return an iterator over the elements of the given object

      * @exception OgnlException if there is an error getting the given object's elements

      */

     Enumeration<?> getElements( Object target ) throws OgnlException;

 }