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 * @since 6.0
027 */
028public interface UnknownAttributeReader {
029
030    /**
031     * When this attribute reader is added via the static method Attribute.addAttributeReader,
032     * an attribute name is associated with it. As the class file parser parses attributes,
033     * it will call various AttributeReaders based on the name of the attributes it is constructing.
034     *
035     * @param name_index    An index into the constant pool, indexing a ConstantUtf8
036     *                      that represents the name of the attribute.
037     * @param length        The length of the data contained in the attribute. This is written
038     *                      into the constant pool and should agree with what the factory expects the length to be.
039     * @param file          This is the data input that the factory needs to read its data from.
040     * @param constant_pool This is the constant pool associated with the Attribute that we are constructing.
041     *
042     * @return The user-defined AttributeReader should take this data and use
043     * it to construct an attribute.  In the case of errors, a null can be
044     * returned which will cause the parsing of the class file to fail.
045     *
046     * @see Attribute#addAttributeReader(String, UnknownAttributeReader)
047     */
048    Attribute createAttribute( int name_index, int length, java.io.DataInput file, ConstantPool constant_pool );
049}