    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 *
    017 */
    018package org.apache.bcel.classfile;
    019
    020/**
    021 * Unknown (non-standard) attributes may be read via user-defined factory
    022 * objects that can be registered with the Attribute.addAttributeReader
    023 * method. These factory objects should implement this interface.
    024
    025 * @see Attribute
    026 * @version $Id$
    027 *
    028 * @deprecated Use UnknownAttributeReader instead
    029 */
    030@java.lang.Deprecated
    031public interface AttributeReader {
    032
    033    /**
    034     When this attribute reader is added via the static method
    035     Attribute.addAttributeReader, an attribute name is associated with it.
    036     As the class file parser parses attributes, it will call various
    037     AttributeReaders based on the name of the attributes it is
    038     constructing.
    039
    040     @param name_index An index into the constant pool, indexing a
    041     ConstantUtf8 that represents the name of the attribute.
    042
    043     @param length The length of the data contained in the attribute.  This
    044     is written into the constant pool and should agree with what the
    045     factory expects the length to be.
    046
    047     @param file This is the data input stream that the factory needs to read
    048     its data from.
    049
    050     @param constant_pool This is the constant pool associated with the
    051     Attribute that we are constructing.
    052
    053     @return The user-defined AttributeReader should take this data and use
    054     it to construct an attribute.  In the case of errors, a null can be
    055     returned which will cause the parsing of the class file to fail.
    056
    057     @see Attribute#addAttributeReader( String, AttributeReader )
    058     */
    059    Attribute createAttribute( int name_index, int length, java.io.DataInputStream file, ConstantPool constant_pool );
    060}