1 /*
2 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
3 * or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file
4 * distributed with this work for additional information
5 * regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file
6 * to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
7 * "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
8 * with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
9 *
10 * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
11 *
12 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
13 * software distributed under the License is distributed on an
14 * "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY
15 * KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the
16 * specific language governing permissions and limitations
17 * under the License.
18 *
19 */
20
21 package org.apache.directory.api.asn1;
22
23
24 /**
25 * <p>
26 * Provides the highest level of abstraction for Decoders. This is the sister
27 * interface of {@link Encoder}. All Decoders implement this common generic
28 * interface.
29 * </p>
30 * <p>
31 * Allows a user to pass a generic Object to any Decoder implementation in the
32 * codec package.
33 * </p>
34 * <p>
35 * One of the two interfaces at the center of the codec package.
36 * </p>
37 *
38 * @author <a href="mailto:dev@directory.apache.org">Apache Directory Project</a>
39 */
40 public interface Decoder
41 {
42
43 /**
44 * Decodes an "encoded" Object and returns a "decoded" Object. Note that the
45 * implementation of this interface will try to cast the Object parameter to
46 * the specific type expected by a particular Decoder implementation. If a
47 * {@link java.lang.ClassCastException} occurs this decode method will throw
48 * a DecoderException.
49 *
50 * @param object an object to "decode"
51 * @return a 'decoded" object
52 * @throws DecoderException a decoder exception can be thrown for any number of reasons.
53 * Some good candidates are that the parameter passed to this method is null, a param
54 * cannot be cast to the appropriate type for a specific encoder.
55 */
56 Object decode( Object object ) throws DecoderException;
57 }