public interface AttributeSet
Attribute.
An attribute set contains a group of attribute values,
where duplicate values are not allowed in the set.
Furthermore, each value in an attribute set is
a member of some category, and at most one value in any particular
category is allowed in the set. For an attribute set, the values are Attribute objects, and the categories are Class objects. An attribute's category is the class (or interface) at the
root of the class hierarchy for that kind of attribute. Note that an
attribute object's category may be a superclass of the attribute object's
class rather than the attribute object's class itself. An attribute
object's
category is determined by calling the getCategory() method defined in interface Attribute.
The interfaces of an AttributeSet resemble those of the Java Collections API's java.util.Map interface, but is more restrictive in the types it will accept, and combines keys and values into an Attribute.
Attribute sets are used in several places in the Print Service API. In
each context, only certain kinds of attributes are allowed to appear in the
attribute set, as determined by the tagging interfaces which the attribute
class implements -- DocAttribute, PrintRequestAttribute, PrintJobAttribute, and PrintServiceAttribute.
There are four specializations of an attribute set that are restricted to
contain just one of the four kinds of attribute -- DocAttributeSet,