FqnProvider.java

/*******************************************************************************
 * Copyright (c) 2012-2017 Codenvy, S.A.
 * All rights reserved. This program and the accompanying materials
 * are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0
 * which accompanies this distribution, and is available at
 * http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html
 *
 * Contributors:
 *   Codenvy, S.A. - initial API and implementation
 *******************************************************************************/
package org.eclipse.che.ide.api.reference;

/**
 * The class provides methods which allows to extract fully qualified name for nodes.
 * Fully qualified name (Fqn) is an unambiguous name that specifies which object, function, or variable a call refers to
 * without regard to the context of the call. In a hierarchical structure, a name is fully qualified when it "is complete in the
 * sense that it includes
 * (a) all names in the hierarchic sequence above the given element and
 * (b) the name of the given element itself."
 * Thus fully qualified names explicitly refer to namespaces that would otherwise be implicit because of the scope of the call.
 *
 * @author Dmitry Shnurenko
 */
public interface FqnProvider {

    /**
     * The methods extracts fqn from nodes which contains it. If node doesn't contain fqn, method returns empty string.
     *
     * @param object
     *         node for which fqn will be extract
     * @return string representation of fqn or empty string if node doesn't contain fqn.
     */
    String getFqn(Object object);
}