src/java/org/apache/lucene/index/TermPositions.java

package org.apache.lucene.index;

/**
 * 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.
 */

import java.io.IOException;

/**
 * TermPositions provides an interface for enumerating the <document,
 * frequency, &lt;position&gt;* &gt; tuples for a term.  <p> The document and
 * frequency are the same as for a TermDocs.  The positions portion lists the ordinal
 * positions of each occurrence of a term in a document.
 *
 * @see IndexReader#termPositions()
 */

public interface TermPositions
    extends TermDocs
{
    /** Returns next position in the current document.  It is an error to call
    this more than {@link #freq()} times
    without calling {@link #next()}<p> This is
    invalid until {@link #next()} is called for
    the first time.
    */
    int nextPosition() throws IOException;
    
    /** 
     * Returns the length of the payload at the current term position.
     * This is invalid until {@link #nextPosition()} is called for
     * the first time.<br>
     * @return length of the current payload in number of bytes
     */
    int getPayloadLength();
    
    /** 
     * Returns the payload data at the current term position.
     * This is invalid until {@link #nextPosition()} is called for
     * the first time.
     * This method must not be called more than once after each call
     * of {@link #nextPosition()}. However, payloads are loaded lazily,
     * so if the payload data for the current position is not needed,
     * this method may not be called at all for performance reasons.<br>
     * 
     * @param data the array into which the data of this payload is to be
     *             stored, if it is big enough; otherwise, a new byte[] array
     *             is allocated for this purpose. 
     * @param offset the offset in the array into which the data of this payload
     *               is to be stored.
     * @return a byte[] array containing the data of this payload
     * @throws IOException
     */
    byte[] getPayload(byte[] data, int offset) throws IOException;

  /**
   * Checks if a payload can be loaded at this position.
   * <p>
   * Payloads can only be loaded once per call to 
   * {@link #nextPosition()}.
   * 
   * @return true if there is a payload available at this position that can be loaded
   */
    public boolean isPayloadAvailable();

}