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.xbean.propertyeditor;
018
019import java.beans.PropertyEditor;
020
021/**
022 * @version $Rev: 6680 $ $Date: 2005-12-24T04:38:27.427468Z $
023 */
024public interface Converter extends PropertyEditor {
025    /**
026     * Gets the the type of object supported by this converter.
027     * @return
028     */
029    Class getType();
030
031    /**
032     * Converts the supplied object to text.  If value is null, null will be returned.  If value is not an instance of
033     * the this converter's type, a PropertyEditorException will be thrown.
034     *
035     * @param value an instance of the editor type
036     * @return the text equivalent of the value
037     * @throws PropertyEditorException if an error occurs while converting the value to a String (this is very rare)
038     */
039    String toString(Object value) throws PropertyEditorException;
040
041    /**
042     * Converts the supplied text in to an instance of the editor type.  If text is null, null will be returned.
043     *
044     * @param text the text to convert
045     * @return an instance of the editor type
046     * @throws PropertyEditorException if an error occurs while converting the text to an object
047     */
048    Object toObject(String text) throws PropertyEditorException;
049}