The hierarchy of converter classes mirrors the hierarchy of property descriptor classes. In the same way that AbstractPropertyDescriptor is the parent for all property descriptors, AbstractConverter is the parent for all property descriptors and implements the Conversion interface. Converters for simple types inherit directly from this abstract super class in a similar way that simple property descriptor classes inherit directly from AbstractPropertyDescriptor. The toolkit provides converters for basic types such as String, Integer, and Float (StringConverter, IntegerConverter, and FloatConverter). These classes are sample implementations of converters for simple types. Depending on application requirements, you may need to extend them or replace them with another implementation.

Converters for compound business objects extending DataCollection (that is, from either KeyedCollection or IndexedCollection) should extend the KCollConverter and IcollConverter provided by the toolkit. These classes extend AbstractConverter. The following diagram shows the relationships between the classes in the converter hierarchy: