Re: How to make a class an alias of another one?
George wrote:
enum, I will get quite some overload in terms String->enum->String
I did mention this, but maybe I don't understand. You can do this
automatically with default enums:
MyChoices choice = MyChoices.valueOf( "Choice1" ); // String->enum
String name = choice.toString(); // enum->String
This works with any Java enum. But perhaps you need something different.
with final places as database or the opposite direction. Maybe I
should just implement that in a String. As my title, it will be nice
What I mean is that if you make an enum like this:
enum Departments { MARKETING, SOFTWARE, MANAGEMENT }
and then someone wants to add a new department to the database, let's
say "SUPPORT", you have to edit the code. If you don't use an enum and
just read the table, you don't have to touch the code. The latter is
almost always better.
if I just call the String here as some special type name. But Java
has no way for this. I need to think about it. Thanks for all your
Just to bring things full circle, Donkey Hottie's original suggestion
still works here. The best way to make a new string in Java is:
public MyChoices {
private String choice;
//...
}
This is much better than trying to alias String or making a sub-class of
String. This encapsulation is much more secure, gives you much more
control over your class, and is much less confusing to other developers.
You can't extend String in Java because the class is final, and the
language designers made String "final" for a reason. It would actually
be pretty daft to extend String. No end of headaches there.
Note that String DOES extend a few interfaces. You could use
CharSequence as your base class, for example. String extends that, and
so can you.