ProviderAdapter Class

The ProviderAdapter class implements aspects of the Provider interface using the ProviderContext. This class implements the accessor and mutator methods of the Provider interface that access the mandatory provider properties. It uses the ProviderContext interface (which contains functionality to read and write properties in the display profile) as its persistent store.

The ProviderAdapter class implements the ProviderWidths interface, which defines the provider widths, and ProviderEditTypes interface, which defines the edit types, making the constants defined in these interfaces available to classes that extend ProviderAdapter.

Developers who wish to implement a provider can extend this class or the ProfileProviderAdapter class for forward compatibility and convenient access to the ProviderContext interface.

See the Javadocs for more information on the methods in this class.

ProfileProviderAdapter Class

The ProfileProviderAdapter is a subclass of the ProviderAdapter that includes convenience wrappers around some commonly used methods in the ProviderContext interface, like get/set*Property(), exists*Property(), get/setStringAttribute(), and getTemplate().

The advantages of using the wrapper methods in the ProfileProviderAdapter class as opposed to using the methods in the ProviderContext interface are the following:

• For example, the ProviderContext.getStringProperty() accepts the channel name as an argument. Since the ProfileProviderAdapter knows the channel name, it can use ProfileProviderAdapter.getStringProperty() method without providing the channel name.

• All of the methods in ProviderContext throw a ProviderContextException. The analogous methods in ProfileProviderAdapter throw a ProviderException. For example, when implementing the getContent() method, since this method is already defined to throw a ProviderException, when a client calls ProfileProviderAdapter.getStringProperty() inside the getContent() method, you need not implement a try-catch block. However, if you use ProviderContext.getStringProperty(), you must catch the ProviderContextException.

See the Javadocs for more information on the methods in this class.