001 /* 002 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one 003 * or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file 004 * distributed with this work for additional information 005 * regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file 006 * to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the 007 * "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance 008 * with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at 009 * 010 * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 011 * 012 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, 013 * software distributed under the License is distributed on an 014 * "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY 015 * KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the 016 * specific language governing permissions and limitations 017 * under the License. 018 * 019 */ 020 021 package org.apache.directory.shared.asn1.codec; 022 023 024 /** 025 * <p> 026 * Provides the highest level of abstraction for Decoders. This is the sister 027 * interface of {@link Encoder}. All Decoders implement this common generic 028 * interface. 029 * </p> 030 * <p> 031 * Allows a user to pass a generic Object to any Decoder implementation in the 032 * codec package. 033 * </p> 034 * <p> 035 * One of the two interfaces at the center of the codec package. 036 * </p> 037 * 038 * @author <a href="mailto:dev@directory.apache.org">Apache Directory Project</a> 039 * @version $Id: Decoder.java 437004 2006-08-25 22:53:17Z elecharny $ 040 */ 041 public interface Decoder 042 { 043 044 /** 045 * Decodes an "encoded" Object and returns a "decoded" Object. Note that the 046 * implementation of this interface will try to cast the Object parameter to 047 * the specific type expected by a particular Decoder implementation. If a 048 * {@link java.lang.ClassCastException} occurs this decode method will throw 049 * a DecoderException. 050 * 051 * @param pObject 052 * an object to "decode" 053 * @return a 'decoded" object 054 * @throws DecoderException 055 * a decoder exception can be thrown for any number of reasons. 056 * Some good candidates are that the parameter passed to this 057 * method is null, a param cannot be cast to the appropriate 058 * type for a specific encoder. 059 */ 060 Object decode( Object pObject ) throws DecoderException; 061 }