/*
 *  Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
 *  contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
 *  this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
 *  The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
 *  (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
 *  the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
 *
 *     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 *
 *  Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 *  distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 *  WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 *  See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 *  limitations under the License.
 */

package org.apache.harmony.javax.security.auth.login;

/**
 * Represents the Service Provider Interface (SPI) for
 * org.apache.harmony.javax.security.auth.login.Configuration class.
 * 
 * If there is any class that wants to provide a Configuration implementation,
 * all abstract methods in this SPI should be implemented.
 * 
 * The detailed implementations should offer a public constructor, in which a
 * Configuration.Paramters implementation acts as an input parameter. If the
 * Configuration.Paramters input cannot by understood by the constructor, an
 * IllegalArgumentException will be thrown.
 * 
 * @since 1.6
 */
public abstract class ConfigurationSpi {

	public ConfigurationSpi() {
		// default constructor
	}

	/**
	 * Get AppConfigurationEntries form the specified name
	 * 
	 * @param name
	 *            The name to get the configuration
	 * @return an array of AppConfigurationEntries
	 */
	protected abstract AppConfigurationEntry[] engineGetAppConfigurationEntry(
			String name);

	/**
	 * Refreshes/reloads the configuration. The behavior of this method depends
	 * on the implementation. For example, calling refresh on a file-based
	 * configuration will cause the file to be re-read.
	 * 
	 * The default implementation of this method does nothing. This method
	 * should be overridden if a refresh operation is supported by the
	 * implementation.
	 * 
	 */
	protected void engineRefresh() {
		// do nothing in default implementation
	}
}