This class defines methods for parsing certificates, certificate chains (certification paths) and certificate revocation lists (CRLs) from byte streams. Obtain a CertificateFactory by calling one of the static getInstance( ) factory methods and specifying the type of certificate or CRL to be parsed, and, optionally, the desired service provider to perform the parsing. The default "SUN" provider defines only a single "X.509" certificate type, so you typically obtain a CertificateFactory with this code:

CertificateFactory certFactory = CertificateFactory.getInstance("X.509");

Once you have obtained a CertificateFactory for the desired type of certificate, call generateCertificate( ) to parse a Certificate from a specified byte stream, or call generateCertificates( ) to parse a group of unrelated certificates (i.e. certificates that do not form a certificate chain) from a stream and return them as a Collection of Certificate objects. Similarly, call generateCRL( ) to parse a single CRL object from a stream, and call generateCRLs( ) to parse a Collection of CRL objects from the stream. These CertificateFactory methods read to the end of the specified stream. If the stream supports mark( ) and reset( ), however, the CertificateFactory resets the stream to the position after the end of the last certificate or CRL read. If you specified a certificate type of "X.509", the Certificate and CRL objects returned by a CertificateFactory can be cast safely to X509Certificate and X509CRL. A certificate factory for X.509 certificates can parse certificates encoded in binary or printable hexadecimal form. If the certificate is in hexadecimal form, it must begin with the string "-BEGIN CERTIFICATE-" and end with the string "-END CERTIFICATE-".

The generateCertPath( ) methods return a CertPath object representing a certificate chain. These methods can create a CertPath object from a List of Certificate object, or by reading the chained certificates from a stream. Specify the encoding of the certificate chain by passing the name of the encoding standard to generateCertPath( ). The default "SUN" provider supports the "PKCS7" and the "PkiPath" encodings. getCertPathEncoding( ) returns an Iterator of the encodings supported by the current provider. The first encoding returned by the iterator is the default used when no encoding is explicitly specified.

public class CertificateFactory {
// Protected Constructors
     protected CertificateFactory(CertificateFactorySpi certFacSpi, 
        java.security.Provider provider, String type);  
// Public Class Methods
     public static final CertificateFactory getInstance(String type) 
        throws CertificateException;  
1.4  public static final CertificateFactory getInstance(String type, 
        java.security.Provider provider) 
        throws CertificateException;  
     public static final CertificateFactory getInstance(String type, 
        String provider) 
        throws CertificateException, java.security.NoSuchProviderException;  
// Public Instance Methods
     public final java.security.cert.Certificate generateCertificate
        (java.io.InputStream inStream) 
        throws CertificateException;  
     public final java.util.Collection<? extends java.security.cert.Certificate>
        generateCertificates(java.io.InputStream inStream) 
        throws CertificateException;  
1.4  public final CertPath generateCertPath(java.util.List<? 
        extends java.security.cert.Certificate> certificates) 
        throws CertificateException;  
1.4  public final CertPath generateCertPath(java.io.InputStream inStream) 
        throws CertificateException;  
1.4  public final CertPath generateCertPath(java.io.InputStream inStream, 
        String encoding) 
        throws CertificateException;  
     public final CRL generateCRL(java.io.InputStream inStream) 
        throws CRLException;  
     public final java.util.Collection<? extends CRL> generateCRLs
        (java.io.InputStream inStream) 
        throws CRLException;  
1.4  public final java.util.Iterator<String> getCertPathEncodings( );  
     public final java.security.Provider getProvider( );  
     public final String getType( );  
}