/*******************************************************************************
 * Copyright (c) 2002, 2008 IBM Corporation and others.
 * All rights reserved. This program and the accompanying materials
 * are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0
 * which accompanies this distribution, and is available at
 * http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html
 *
 * Initial Contributors:
 * The following IBM employees contributed to the Remote System Explorer
 * component that contains this file: David McKnight, Kushal Munir,
 * Michael Berger, David Dykstal, Phil Coulthard, Don Yantzi, Eric Simpson,
 * Emily Bruner, Mazen Faraj, Adrian Storisteanu, Li Ding, and Kent Hawley.
 *
 * Contributors:
 * David Dykstal (IBM) - [226561] Add API markup for noextend / noimplement where needed
 *******************************************************************************/

package org.eclipse.rse.core.references;

/**
 * Referencing objects are shadows of real objects. Typically, shadows are
 * created to enable a GUI which does not allow the same real object to appear
 * multiple times. In these cases, a unique shadow object is created for each
 * unique instance of the real object.
 * <p>
 * The parent interface ISystemReferencingObject captures the simple set of
 * methods such a shadow must implement.
 * <p>
 * This interface specializes that for the case of references that must be
 * persisted. Typically, we build the references in memory at runtime just to
 * satisfy the GUI. However, occasionally we build the list of references for a
 * more permanent reason, such as when we let a user choose a subset from a
 * master list.
 * <p>
 * When we persist such a reference, we can't persist the memory reference to
 * the master object. Instead, we persist the unique name or key of that object,
 * and upon restoring from disk we then resolve that into a runtime reference to
 * a real memory object.
 * <p>
 * This interface captures the methods to set and query that name or key.
 *
 * @noimplement This interface is not intended to be implemented by clients. The
 *              standard implementations are included in the framework.
 */
public interface IRSEBasePersistableReferencingObject extends IRSEBaseReferencingObject {
	/**
	 * Set the object to which we reference. This is an overload of the parent
	 * interface method of the same name. This one takes an object of which we
	 * can query its unique name for the purpose of saving that to disk.
	 */
	public void setReferencedObject(IRSEBasePersistableReferencedObject obj);

	/**
	 * Query the unique name or key of the object we are referencing.
	 */
	public String getReferencedObjectName();
}
