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 org.apache.carbondata.core.keygenerator;
  
  import java.io.Serializable;
  import java.util.Comparator;
  
  /**
   * It generates the key by using multiple keys(typically multiple dimension keys
   * are combined to form a single key). And it can return the individual
   * key(dimensional key) out of combined key.
   */
  public interface KeyGenerator extends Serializable, Comparator<byte[]> {
  
    /**
     * It generates the single key aka byte array from multiple keys.
     *
     * @param keys
     * @return
     */
    byte[] generateKey(int[] keys);
  
    /**
     * It gets array of keys out of single key aka byte array
     *
     * @param key
     * @param offset
     * @return array of keys.
     */
    long[] getKeyArray(byte[] key, int offset);
  
    /**
     * returns the dimension count
     *
     * @return
     */
    int getDimCount();
  
  }