content: /**
   * 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 com.manning.hip.ch4.joins.improved.impl;
  
  import org.apache.commons.lang.builder.ToStringBuilder;
  import org.apache.hadoop.io.*;
  import org.apache.hadoop.mapred.JobConf;
  
  /**
   * This abstract class serves as the base class for the values that 
   * flow from the mappers to the reducers in a data join job. 
   * Typically, in such a job, the mappers will compute the source
   * tag of an input record based on its attributes or based on the 
   * file name of the input file. This tag will be used by the reducers
   * to re-group the values of a given key according to their source tags.
   * 
   */
  public abstract class OutputValue implements Writable {
    protected BooleanWritable smaller;
  
    public OutputValue() {
      this.smaller = new BooleanWritable(false);
    }
  
    public BooleanWritable isSmaller() {
      return smaller;
    }
  
    public void setSmaller(BooleanWritable smaller) {
      this.smaller = smaller;
    }
  
    public abstract Writable getData();
    
    public OutputValue clone(JobConf job) {
      return WritableUtils.clone(this, job);
    }
  
    @Override
    public String toString() {
      return ToStringBuilder.reflectionToString(this);
    }
  }
  