How do you make a deep copy of an object?

Question

It\'s a bit difficult to implement a deep object copy function. What steps you take to ensure the original object and the cloned one share no reference?

Answer 1

Deep copying can only be done with each class's consent. If you have control over the class hierarchy then you can implement the clonable interface and implement the Clone method. Otherwise doing a deep copy is impossible to do safely because the object may also be sharing non-data resources (e.g. database connections). In general however deep copying is considered bad practice in the Java environment and should be avoided via the appropriate design practices.