Horrible PropertySet Format API reads things like Document Summary info from OLE 2 Compound document files. Processes streams in the Horrible Property Set Format (HPSF) in POI filesystems. Microsoft Office documents, i.e. POI filesystems, usually contain meta data like author, title, last editing date etc. These items are called properties and stored in property set streams along with the document itself. These streams are commonly named \005SummaryInformation and \005DocumentSummaryInformation. However, a POI filesystem may contain further property sets of other names or types. In order to extract the properties from a POI filesystem, a property set stream's contents must be parsed into a Poi.Net.HPSF.PropertySet} instance. Its subclasses Poi.Net.HPSF.SummaryInformation} and Poi.Net.HPSF.DocumentSummaryInformation} deal with the well-known property set streams \005SummaryInformation and \005DocumentSummaryInformation. (However, the streams' names are irrelevant. What counts is the property set's first section's format ID - see below.) The factory method Poi.Net.HPSF.PropertySetFactory#create} creates a Poi.Net.HPSF.PropertySet} instance. This method always returns the most specific property set: If it identifies the stream data as a Summary Information or as a Document Summary Information it returns an instance of the corresponding class, else the general Poi.Net.HPSF.PropertySet}. A Poi.Net.HPSF.PropertySet} contains a list of Poi.Net.HPSF.Section}s which can be retrieved with Poi.Net.HPSF.PropertySet#getSections}. Each Poi.Net.HPSF.Section} contains a Poi.Net.HPSF.Property} array which can be retrieved with Poi.Net.HPSF.Section#getProperties}. Since the vast majority of Poi.Net.HPSF.PropertySet}s contains only a single Poi.Net.HPSF.Section}, the convenience method Poi.Net.HPSF.PropertySet#getProperties} returns the properties of a Poi.Net.HPSF.PropertySet}'s Poi.Net.HPSF.Section} (throwing a Poi.Net.HPSF.NoSingleSectionException} if the Poi.Net.HPSF.PropertySet} contains more (or less) than exactly one Poi.Net.HPSF.Section}). Each Poi.Net.HPSF.Property} has an ID, a type, and a value which can be retrieved with Poi.Net.HPSF.Property#getID}, Poi.Net.HPSF.Property#getType}, and Poi.Net.HPSF.Property#GetValue}, respectively. The value's class depends on the property's type. The current implementation does not yet support all property types and restricts the values' classes to java.lang.String}, java.lang.Integer} and java.util.Date}. A value of a yet unknown type is returned as a byte array containing the value's origin bytes from the property set stream. To retrieve the value of a specific Poi.Net.HPSF.Property}, use Poi.Net.HPSF.Section#getProperty} or Poi.Net.HPSF.Section#getPropertyIntValue}. The Poi.Net.HPSF.SummaryInformation} and Poi.Net.HPSF.DocumentSummaryInformation} classes provide convenience methods for retrieving well-known properties. For example, an application that wants to retrieve a document's title string just calls Poi.Net.HPSF.SummaryInformation#getTitle} instead of going through the hassle of first finding out what the title's property ID is and then using this ID to get the property's value. @author Rainer Klute (klute@rainer-klute.de) @version $Id: package.html,v 1.3.8.1 2004/02/28 12:55:57 glens Exp $ @since 2002-02-09