DESY ACOP Beans Home

com.cosylab.gui.adapters
Interface Converter

All Superinterfaces:

java.lang.Cloneable, DataConsumer, DataSource, java.io.Serializable

All Known Implementing Classes:

AbstractConverter, ConverterChain, ExponentialConverter, IdentityConverter, LinearConverter, LogarithmicConverter, MultiplierConverter, PotentialConverter, SimpleArrayConverterSupport, SimpleConverterSupport

public interface Converter
extends DataSource, DataConsumer, java.lang.Cloneable, java.io.Serializable

Converter interface distinguishes objects that wish to act as data converters for data flow betwean some arbitrary DataSource and DataConsumer. To accomplish this they must represent itself as data consumer to peer data source, thus implementing DataConsumer interface, and on the other side accept peer data consumer as data source, thus implementing at the same time DataSource interface. With such approach it is possible to chain multiple Converters in a single data flow line from source to consumer.

Besides implementing DataSource and DataConsumer interfaces converter must comply to the following contract:

• When implementing method DataCosnumer::addConsumer(DataConsumer) the consumer parameter must be examined for the following:
  • If the consumer is NonblockingNumberConsumer, then it comes from peer data source and wants to receive notifications from this converter as data source of feedback requests. See Displayer documentation for details. At the moment only NonblockingNumberConsumer is supported, later will be also other Nonblocking<TYPPE>Consumer, Synchronous<TYPPE>Consumer and Asynchronous<TYPPE>Consumer interfaces from con.cosylab.gui.displayers package.
  • Any other consumer is treated as it would normaly be in data source:
  • consumer is added to the list of consumers which will be notified about data flow events.
  • if consumer implements DataSource interface we must add NonblockingNumberConsumer implementation, which will dispatch value change notifications to set of consumers of same type, the ones that was mentioned above in first bullet.

To clear the things there is simple exemplatory implementation MultiplierConverter. This example is fully functional and performs convertions in which any incoming number is multiplied by some user defined factor. To see how this example converter is used run con.cosylab.showcase.CalculationPanel showcase demo.

The SimpleConverterSupport class could be used as implementation base for most of transformations.

Since:

Feb 14, 2004.

Version:

$Id: Converter.java,v 1.10 2008-04-22 12:31:02 jbobnar Exp $

Author:

Igor Kriznar

See Also:

Displayer, DataSource, DataConsumer, SimpleConverterSupport, MultiplierConverter

Method Summary

java.lang.Object

clone()

Methods inherited from interface com.cosylab.gui.displayers.DataSource

addConsumer, getAcceptableConsumerTypes, getConsumers, removeAllConsumers, removeConsumer

Methods inherited from interface com.cosylab.gui.displayers.DataConsumer

getDataConsumer, getDefaultDataConsumer, getName, getSupportedCharacteristics, getSupportedConsumerTypes, setCharacteristics, updateDataState

Method Detail

clone

java.lang.Object clone()
                       throws java.lang.CloneNotSupportedException

Throws:

java.lang.CloneNotSupportedException