/*
 * 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.hive.hcatalog.data.transfer;

import java.io.Externalizable;


/**
 * This read context is obtained by the master node and should be distributed
 * to the slaves.  The contents of the class are opaque to the client.  This
 * interface extends {@link java.io.Externalizable} so that implementing
 * classes can be serialized using standard Java mechanisms.
 */
public interface ReaderContext extends Externalizable {

  /**
   * Determine the number of splits available in this {@link ReaderContext}.
   * The client is not required to have this many slave nodes,
   * as one slave can be used to read multiple splits.
   * @return number of splits
   */
  public int numSplits();

}
