Access subclass fields from a base class in Java

Question

I have a base class called Geometry from which there exists a subclass Sphere:

public class Geometry 
{
 String shape_name;
 String materia         


        

Answer 1

If you want to access properties of a subclass, you're going to have to cast to the subclass.

if (g instanceof Sphere)
{
    Sphere s = (Sphere) g;
    System.out.println(s.radius);
    ....
}

This isn't the most OO way to do things, though: once you have more subclasses of Geometry you're going to need to start casting to each of those types, which quickly becomes a big mess. If you want to print the properties of an object, you should have a method on your Geometry object called print() or something along those lines, that will print each of the properties in the object. Something like this:

class Geometry {
   ...
   public void print() {
      System.out.println(shape_name);
      System.out.println(material);
   }
}

class Shape extends Geometry {
   ...
   public void print() {
      System.out.println(radius);
      System.out.println(center);
      super.print();
   }
}

This way, you don't need to do the casting and you can just call g.print() inside your while loop.