Re: Define Type at runtime

From:

BGB <cr88192@hotmail.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 14:20:39 -0700

Message-ID:

<4E6931A7.5010208@hotmail.com>

On 9/8/2011 11:25 AM, Lew wrote:

BGB wrote:

Lew wrote:

John wrote:

If I have a method:
public void someMethod(Object o){
       ...
       Entity<T> entity;
       ....
}

How could I define at runtime the type T if I have an Object?

You can do an illegal cast with the help of '@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")' and a 'catch ( ClassCastException exc )'.

You can under certain circumstances use a run-time type token of type 'Class<T>'.

You can write your method to be type-safe in the first place and avoid the problem.

Without some context we can't know what you really want. Your question is far too non-specific.

and, probably, not to forget "instanceof".

That's pretty useless in this context.

eg, [sic] rather than, say:
Object obja;
try {
      SomeObject objb=(SomeObject)obja;
      ...
}catch(ClassCastException ex)
{
}

one could be like:
if(obja instanceof SomeObject)
{
      SomeObject objb=(SomeObject)obja;
      ...
}

which could be more useful if one wants to do the types N-way...

if(...)
{
      ...
}else if(...)
{
      ...
}else ...

or such...

That's bad advice on several fronts. First of all, the OP was asking about restoring generics information, for which 'instanceof' is not useful, and second, multi-'if' constructs on type are a red flag of bad design. Don't recommend bad design.

AFAICT, the OP was asking about dynamic type checking, which is what
instanceof is for.

the bigger issue though would be, why the OP was dealing with the case
in the first case (like, yes, does a common base-class exist besides
"Object", or is there a common interface, ...), but failing this, nested
if/else and instanceof does seem like a valid solution (and is probably
still better than, say, a series of try/catch blocks intermixed with
return statements).

try {
     ...
     return;
}catch(...) { ... }

try {
     ...
     return;
}catch(...) { ... }

....

but, whatever works...