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package org.jooq.meta;

/**
 * An interface defining a column of an embeddable type.
 *
 * @author Lukas Eder
 */
public interface EmbeddableColumnDefinition extends TypedElementDefinition<EmbeddableDefinition>, PositionedDefinition {

    /**
     * The referencing column definition.
     */
    ColumnDefinition getReferencingColumn();

    /**
     * The data type definition of the embeddable.
     * <p>
     * This may be different from the data type definition of the
     * {@link #getReferencingColumn()}, depending on what
     * {@link #merge(EmbeddableColumnDefinition)} produced as a result e.g. of
     * merging multiple distinct nullabilities.
     */
    @Override
    DataTypeDefinition getType();

    /**
     * The {@link PositionedDefinition#getPosition()} of
     * {@link #getReferencingColumn()} within its defining table.
     * <p>
     * [#17434] While in most RDBMS, this value is 1-based and a consecutive
     * ordinal, there may be cases where a positional value is skipped, either
     * by what's reported by the RDBMS's dictionary views, or because the
     * definition is filtered by jOOQ-meta. Users shouldn't rely on the
     * positions reflecting the actually generated column/attribute/etc.
     * position.
     */
    int getReferencingColumnPosition();

    /**
     * Merge type information of another referencing
     * {@link EmbeddableColumnDefinition} into this
     * {@link EmbeddableColumnDefinition}.
     * <p>
     * Multiple referencing column definitions can be used to define an
     * embeddable column definition. The types and constraints on these
     * alternative references may differ. For example, one column may be
     * nullable, others may not be nullable.
     */
    void merge(EmbeddableColumnDefinition other);

}
