Overriding the java equals() method - not working?

Question

I ran into an interesting (and very frustrating) issue with the equals() method today which caused what I thought to be a well tested class to crash and cause a

Answer 1

Slightly off-topic to your question, but it's probably worth mentioning anyway:

Commons Lang has got some excellent methods you can use in overriding equals and hashcode. Check out EqualsBuilder.reflectionEquals(...) and HashCodeBuilder.reflectionHashCode(...). Saved me plenty of headache in the past - although of course if you just want to do "equals" on ID it may not fit your circumstances.

I also agree that you should use the @Override annotation whenever you're overriding equals (or any other method).