/*
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.plc4x.java.api.model;

/**
 * Base type for all field types.
 * Typically every driver provides an implementation of this interface in order
 * to be able to describe the fields of a resource. As this is completely tied to
 * the implemented protocol, this base interface makes absolutely no assumption to
 * any information it should provide.
 *
 * In order to stay platform and protocol independent every driver connection implementation
 * provides a prepareField(String) method that is able to parse a string representation of
 * a resource into it's individual field type. Manually constructing PlcField objects
 * manually makes the solution less independent from the protocol, but might be faster.
 */
public interface PlcField {

    /**
     * Returns the "default" type of the response one can expect from this field as java type.
     * I.e., a call to getXXX for the ResponseItem should succeed.
     *
     * The contract is not to return the exact type which is internally hold by PLC4X but to
     * return a "casteable" type, i.e., a type whiches getXXX method succeeds.
     * So for example if a type is internally a short, but the getInt() method is implemented, it
     * is allowed to return Integer.class by this method.
     *
     * <b>This method should always return the BOXED type for primitives. E.g. not bool.class but Boolean.class</b>
     * @return Either specific type or Object.class if no specific type is known.
     */
    default Class<?> getDefaultJavaType() {
        return Object.class;
    }

}
