/*
 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
 * or more contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file
 * distributed with this work for additional information
 * regarding copyright ownership.  The ASF licenses this file
 * to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
 * "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
 * with the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
 *
 *   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 *
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
 * software distributed under the License is distributed on an
 * "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY
 * KIND, either express or implied.  See the License for the
 * specific language governing permissions and limitations
 * under the License.
 */

package freemarker.template;

import java.util.Collection;

/**
 * "collection" template language data type: a collection of values that can be enumerated, but can't be or not meant to
 * be accessed by index or key, nor the number of elements in it is known. As such, this is very similar to Java's
 * {@link Iterable} interface (but it predates that interface, hence the unfortunate class name).
 * 
 * <p>
 * Note that this is not a super-interface of {@link TemplateSequenceModel}, and implementations of that interface
 * needn't also implement this interface just because they can. They should though, if enumeration with this interface
 * is significantly faster than enumeration by index. The {@code #list} directive will enumerate using this interface if
 * it's available.
 * 
 * <p>
 * The enumeration should be repeatable if that's possible with reasonable effort, otherwise a second enumeration
 * attempt is allowed to throw an {@link TemplateModelException}. Generally, the interface user Java code need not
 * handle that kind of exception, as in practice only the template author can handle it, by not listing such collections
 * twice.
 * 
 * <p>
 * Note that to wrap Java's {@link Collection}, you should implement {@link TemplateCollectionModelEx}, not just this
 * interface.
 */
public interface TemplateCollectionModel extends TemplateModel {

    /**
     * Retrieves a template model iterator that is used to iterate over the elements in this collection.
     */
    public TemplateModelIterator iterator() throws TemplateModelException;

}