001/**
002 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
003 * contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
004 * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
005 * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
006 * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
007 * the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
008 *
009 *      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
010 *
011 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
012 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
013 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
014 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
015 * limitations under the License.
016 */
017package org.apache.camel;
018
019import java.lang.annotation.Documented;
020import java.lang.annotation.ElementType;
021import java.lang.annotation.Retention;
022import java.lang.annotation.RetentionPolicy;
023import java.lang.annotation.Target;
024
025/**
026 * An annotation used to mark classes and methods to indicate code capable of
027 * converting from a type to another type which are then auto-discovered using
028 * the <a href="http://camel.apache.org/type-converter.html">Type
029 * Conversion Support</a>
030 * 
031 * @version 
032 */
033@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
034@Documented
035@Target({ElementType.TYPE, ElementType.METHOD })
036public @interface Converter {
037
038    /**
039     * Whether or not returning <tt>null</tt> is a valid response.
040     */
041    boolean allowNull() default false;
042
043    /**
044     * Whether to ignore the type converter if it cannot be loaded for some reason.
045     * <p/>
046     * This can be used if a Camel component provides multiple components
047     * where the end user can opt-out some of these components by excluding
048     * dependencies on the classpath, meaning the type converter would not
049     * be able to load due class not found errors. But in those cases its
050     * okay as the component is opted-out.
051     * <p/>
052     * Important this configuration must be set on the class-level, not on the method.
053     */
054    boolean ignoreOnLoadError() default false;
055}