libjava/org/w3c/dom/Entity.java

   1 /*
   2  * Copyright (c) 2000 World Wide Web Consortium,
   3  * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut National de
   4  * Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Keio University). All
   5  * Rights Reserved. This program is distributed under the W3C's Software
   6  * Intellectual Property License. This program is distributed in the
   7  * hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even
   8  * the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
   9  * PURPOSE.
  10  * See W3C License http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ for more details.
  11  */
  12
  13 package org.w3c.dom;
  14
  15 /**
  16  * This interface represents an entity, either parsed or unparsed, in an XML
  17  * document. Note that this models the entity itself not the entity
  18  * declaration. <code>Entity</code> declaration modeling has been left for a
  19  * later Level of the DOM specification.
  20  * <p>The <code>nodeName</code> attribute that is inherited from
  21  * <code>Node</code> contains the name of the entity.
  22  * <p>An XML processor may choose to completely expand entities before the
  23  * structure model is passed to the DOM; in this case there will be no
  24  * <code>EntityReference</code> nodes in the document tree.
  25  * <p>XML does not mandate that a non-validating XML processor read and
  26  * process entity declarations made in the external subset or declared in
  27  * external parameter entities. This means that parsed entities declared in
  28  * the external subset need not be expanded by some classes of applications,
  29  * and that the replacement value of the entity may not be available. When
  30  * the replacement value is available, the corresponding <code>Entity</code>
  31  * node's child list represents the structure of that replacement text.
  32  * Otherwise, the child list is empty.
  33  * <p>The DOM Level 2 does not support editing <code>Entity</code> nodes; if a
  34  * user wants to make changes to the contents of an <code>Entity</code>,
  35  * every related <code>EntityReference</code> node has to be replaced in the
  36  * structure model by a clone of the <code>Entity</code>'s contents, and
  37  * then the desired changes must be made to each of those clones instead.
  38  * <code>Entity</code> nodes and all their descendants are readonly.
  39  * <p>An <code>Entity</code> node does not have any parent.If the entity
  40  * contains an unbound namespace prefix, the <code>namespaceURI</code> of
  41  * the corresponding node in the <code>Entity</code> node subtree is
  42  * <code>null</code>. The same is true for <code>EntityReference</code>
  43  * nodes that refer to this entity, when they are created using the
  44  * <code>createEntityReference</code> method of the <code>Document</code>
  45  * interface. The DOM Level 2 does not support any mechanism to resolve
  46  * namespace prefixes.
  47  * <p>See also the <a href='http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-DOM-Level-2-Core-20001113'>Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core Specification</a>.
  48  */
  49 public interface Entity extends Node {
  50     /**
  51      * The public identifier associated with the entity, if specified. If the
  52      * public identifier was not specified, this is <code>null</code>.
  53      */
  54     public String getPublicId();
  55
  56     /**
  57      * The system identifier associated with the entity, if specified. If the
  58      * system identifier was not specified, this is <code>null</code>.
  59      */
  60     public String getSystemId();
  61
  62     /**
  63      * For unparsed entities, the name of the notation for the entity. For
  64      * parsed entities, this is <code>null</code>.
  65      */
  66     public String getNotationName();
  67
  68 }