Re: Cannot override protected fields

From:

Hoss Spence <hossspence@hotmail.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 21:52:47 -0000

Message-ID:

<1181944367.146152.306060@z28g2000prd.googlegroups.com>

On Jun 15, 12:52 pm, lithyu...@gmail.com wrote:

You know, that has nothing to do with protected fields. In fact the
same would be true if the fields were public.

What you might want is something like this:

public class ChildForm extends ParentForm {
    public ChildForm() {
        name = "ChildForm";
    }

}

This way, instead of declaring another member variable with the same
name as the parent class you assign the parent's name variable a new
value upon construction. :)

DeeGoogle escreveu:

I know this is not possible, but my question is why did they design it
that way:

public class ParentForm {
     protected String name = "ParentForm";
     protected String getName(){return name;}
}

public class ChildForm extends ParentForm{
     protected String name = "ChildForm"; //I am trying to override
the field value but reuse the method from parent.
}

public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
           System.out.println((new ParentForm()).getName());
           System.out.println((new ChildForm()).getName());
   }
}

Output:
ParentForm
ParentForm

I wanted to see "ChildForm" in the second line. Why do I have to
duplicate (literally cut and paste) the getName() method in the child
to achieve it ?

Can someone explain the concept I am missing ?

Generally bad form to override instance variables. You want to define
them once in the super class and set them in the constructor or a
setter in the subclass.