/*
 *    Geotoolkit - An Open Source Java GIS Toolkit
 *    http://www.geotoolkit.org
 *
 *    (C) 2009, Geomatys
 *
 *    This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
 *    modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public
 *    License as published by the Free Software Foundation;
 *    version 2.1 of the License.
 *
 *    This library 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.
 */

package org.geotoolkit.feature.xml;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.Map;
import javax.xml.stream.XMLStreamException;
import org.geotoolkit.data.FeatureReader;
import org.opengis.feature.FeatureType;

/**
 * An interface for feature / feature collection XML parsing.
 *
 * @module
 * @author Guilhem Legal (Geomatys)
 */
public interface XmlFeatureReader extends Configurable {

    /**
     * Read a feature or featureCollection from the specified String XML source.
     *
     * @param xml An Xml representation of the feature/feature collection.
     *
     * @return A SimpleFeature / featureCollection or {@code null}
     */
    public Object read(Object xml) throws IOException, XMLStreamException;

    /**
     * Read a feature or featureCollection from the specified String XML source.
     * Reads features one by one if possible.
     *
     * @return FeatureReader
     * @throws IOException
     * @throws XMLStreamException 
     */
    public FeatureReader readAsStream(Object xml) throws IOException, XMLStreamException;

    /**
     * Extract the mapping between namespaces and prefix from an xml document;
     *
     * @param xml
     * @return
     */
    public Map<String, String> extractNamespace(String xml);

    public void setFeatureType(FeatureType featureType);

    /**
     * Free the resources.
     */
    void dispose();
}