/**
 * AnalyzerBeans
 * Copyright (C) 2014 Neopost - Customer Information Management
 *
 * 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.eobjects.analyzer.data;

import java.io.Serializable;

import org.apache.metamodel.schema.Column;
import org.apache.metamodel.util.HasName;

/**
 * Represents a column that is used to retrieve values from a row of data. A
 * column can be either physical (based directly on a database column) or
 * virtual if the values yielded by this column are have been transformed (eg.
 * tokenized, sampled etc.)
 * 
 * @param <E>
 *            the data type of the column
 */
public interface InputColumn<E> extends HasName, Comparable<InputColumn<E>>, Serializable {

    /**
     * @return the name of this column
     */
    @Override
    public String getName();

    /**
     * @return true if this InputColumn is based on a physical column that can
     *         be natively queried.
     */
    public boolean isPhysicalColumn();

    /**
     * @return true if this InputColumn is virtual (ie. the opposite of
     *         physical).
     */
    public boolean isVirtualColumn();

    /**
     * @return the underlying physical column.
     * @throws IllegalStateException
     *             if isPhysicalColumn() is false
     */
    public Column getPhysicalColumn() throws IllegalStateException;

    /**
     * The Data type stored in this column represented as a Java type. Notice
     * that for most purposes you should ud getDataTypeFamily as it is limited
     * to the actual supported families of data types (eg. File is not a
     * supported data type, but Integer, Float, String etc. are).
     * 
     * @return the data type of this column.
     */
    public Class<? extends E> getDataType();

}