oracle.ide.net
Interface NameGenerator

All Known Implementing Classes:

DefaultNameGenerator

public interface NameGenerator

This is a callback interface used by the URLFactory while it is in the process of producing a new unique URL.

Method Summary

java.lang.String

nextName() This method is called by URLFactory from one of its newUniqueURL(...) methods to obtain a relative file name, which is usually just a simple file name without any preceeding directory names, that will be used in the process of generating a unique URL.

Method Detail

nextName

public java.lang.String nextName()

This method is called by URLFactory from one of its newUniqueURL(...) methods to obtain a relative file name, which is usually just a simple file name without any preceeding directory names, that will be used in the process of generating a unique URL.

The URLFactory is responsible for assembling a complete URL by combining a base URL with the relative file name returned by nextName(). The URLFactory is also responsible for checking that the newly created URL is unique among files on disk and within the IDE's caches. If the new URL is not unique, then URLFactory will issue another call to nextName() to get a new name. This process is repeated until either a unique URL is produced, or the URLFactory "times out" on the NameGenerator implementation after a very large number of iterations fails to produce a unique URL.

Therefore to interact properly with URLFactory, the nextName() implementation must return a different name each time it is invoked. More specifically, a particular instance of NameGenerator should not return any name more than once from its nextName() method. Of course, this restriction does not apply across different instances of NameGenerator.

The exact means by which a new name is produced is not specified and is left to the specific NameGenerator classes. However, the nextName() method should not attempt to create an URL and check for its uniqueness, as this may lead to problems in the future when the URLFactory and URLFileSystem classes are enhanced. For example, if individual NameGenerator implementations are attempting to determine uniqueness, bugs may surface later if the IDE's algorithm for determining uniqueness changes. How the IDE determines URLuniqueness is not documented and should be considered an implementation detail of the IDE framework. For an example of a NameGenerator implementation, see DefaultNameGenerator.