/**
* DataCleaner (community edition)
* 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.datacleaner.storage;
import org.datacleaner.api.Component;
import org.datacleaner.api.Provided;
/**
* The RowAnnotationFactory represents a mechanism used to annotate/label rows
* of data during execution. Typically these annotations will be stored on disk
* and thus provide a convenient storage mechanism for situations where a
* component needs to manage a set of labels but where storing them in
* collections would be too complicated and would fill up memory.
*
* The RowAnnotationFactory is injectable into any {@link Component} (analyzer,
* transformer, filter) using the {@link Provided} annotation.
*/
public interface RowAnnotationFactory extends RowAnnotationSampleContainer, RowAnnotationHandler {
/**
* Creates a new annotation
*
* @return a new annotation
*/
RowAnnotation createAnnotation();
}