javax.time.calendar
Interface PeriodProvider

All Known Implementing Classes:
Period, PeriodField, PeriodFields

public interface PeriodProvider

Provides access to a period of time, such as '2 Years and 5 Months'.

PeriodProvider is a simple interface that provides uniform access to any object that can provide access to a period.

The implementation of PeriodProvider may be mutable. The result of toPeriodFields(), however, is immutable.

When implementing an API that accepts a PeriodProvider as a parameter, it is important to convert the input to a PeriodFields once and once only. It is recommended that this is done at the top of the method before other processing. This is necessary to handle the case where the implementation of the provider is mutable and changes in value between two calls to toPeriodFields().

The recommended way to convert a DateProvider to a LocalDate is using PeriodFields.of(PeriodProvider) as this method provides additional null checking.

This interface makes no guarantees about the thread-safety or immutability of implementations.

Author:
Stephen Colebourne

Method Summary
 PeriodFields toPeriodFields()
          Returns an instance of PeriodFields initialized from the state of this object.
 

Method Detail

toPeriodFields

PeriodFields toPeriodFields()
Returns an instance of PeriodFields initialized from the state of this object.

This method will take the period represented by this object and return an equivalent PeriodFields. The amount stored for a unit in the result may be zero. If this object is already a PeriodFields then it is simply returned.

Implementations must ensure that calls to this method are thread-safe. An immutable implementation will naturally provide this guarantee.

Returns:
the period equivalent to this one, not null