/**
* 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.
*/
package org.apache.gora.persistency;

/**
 * Interface designed to accomodate structures that can be dirty, such as maps
 * and lists, but whose dirtyness should not be set directly because dirtyness
 * results from structural modification or content change, and which have no
 * notion of ordered fields (such as Persistent).
 */
public interface Dirtyable {

  /**
   * Returns whether any of the fields of the object has been modified after
   * construction or loading.
   * 
   * @return whether any of the fields of the object has changed
   */
  boolean isDirty();

  /**
   * Clears the dirty state.
   */
  void clearDirty();

}
