The abstract class
ContentHandler
is the superclass of all classes that read an
Object
from a
URLConnection
.
An application does not generally call the getContent
method in this class directly. Instead, an application calls the getContent
method in class URL
or in URLConnection
. The application's content handler factory (an instance of a class that implements the interface ContentHandlerFactory
set up by a call to setContentHandlerFactory
is called with a String
giving the MIME type of the object being received on the socket. The factory returns an instance of a subclass of ContentHandler
, and its getContent
method is called to create the object.
If no content handler could be found, URLConnection will look for a content handler in a user-definable set of places. Users can define a vertical-bar delimited set of class prefixes to search through by defining the "java.content.handler.pkgs" property. The class name must be of the form:
{package-prefix}.{major}.{minor}
where {major}.{minor} is formed by taking the content-type string, replacing all slash characters with a period
('.'), and all other non-alphanumeric characters with the underscore character '_
'. The alphanumeric characters are specifically the 26 uppercase ASCII letters 'A
' through 'Z
', the 26 lowercase ASCII letters 'a
' through 'z
', and the 10 ASCII digits '0
' through '9
'.
e.g. YoyoDyne.experimental.text.plain
If no user-defined content handler is found, then the system tries to load a specific
content-type handler from one of the built-in handlers, if one exists.
If the loading of the content handler class would be performed by a classloader that is outside of the delegation chain of the caller, the JVM will need the RuntimePermission "getClassLoader".