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1   /*
2    * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
3    * contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
4    * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
5    * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
6    * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
7    * the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
8    *
9    *      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
10   *
11   *  Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
12   *  distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
13   *  WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
14   *  See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
15   *  limitations under the License.
16   */
17  
18  package org.apache.bcel.classfile;
19  
20  /**
21   * Unknown (non-standard) attributes may be read via user-defined factory objects that can be registered with the
22   * Attribute.addAttributeReader method. These factory objects should implement this interface.
23   *
24   * @see Attribute
25   * @since 6.0
26   */
27  public interface UnknownAttributeReader {
28  
29      /**
30       * When this attribute reader is added via the static method Attribute.addAttributeReader, an attribute name is
31       * associated with it. As the class file parser parses attributes, it will call various AttributeReaders based on the
32       * name of the attributes it is constructing.
33       *
34       * @param nameIndex An index into the constant pool, indexing a ConstantUtf8 that represents the name of the attribute.
35       * @param length The length of the data contained in the attribute. This is written into the constant pool and should
36       *        agree with what the factory expects the length to be.
37       * @param file This is the data input that the factory needs to read its data from.
38       * @param constantPool This is the constant pool associated with the Attribute that we are constructing.
39       *
40       * @return The user-defined AttributeReader should take this data and use it to construct an attribute. In the case of
41       *         errors, a null can be returned which will cause the parsing of the class file to fail.
42       *
43       * @see Attribute#addAttributeReader(String, UnknownAttributeReader)
44       */
45      Attribute createAttribute(int nameIndex, int length, java.io.DataInput file, ConstantPool constantPool);
46  }