/*
* Hibernate, Relational Persistence for Idiomatic Java
*
* Copyright (c) 2010, Red Hat Inc. or third-party contributors as
* indicated by the @author tags or express copyright attribution
* statements applied by the authors. All third-party contributions are
* distributed under license by Red Hat Inc.
*
* This copyrighted material is made available to anyone wishing to use, modify,
* copy, or redistribute it subject to the terms and conditions of the GNU
* Lesser General Public License, as published by the Free Software Foundation.
*
* This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
* but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
* or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License
* for more details.
*
* You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License
* along with this distribution; if not, write to:
* Free Software Foundation, Inc.
* 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor
* Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA
*/
package org.hibernate.type;
/**
* Additional contract for a {@link Type} may be used for a discriminator. THis contract is used to process
* the string representation as presented in metadata, especially in <tt>XML</tt> files.
*
* @author Gavin King
*/
public interface IdentifierType<T> extends Type {
/**
* Convert the value from the mapping file to a Java object.
*
* @param xml the value of <tt>discriminator-value</tt> or <tt>unsaved-value</tt> attribute
* @return The converted value of the string representation.
*
* @throws Exception Indicates a problem converting from the string
*/
public T stringToObject(String xml) throws Exception;
}