Casting between ArrayLists in Java

Question

Sorry, I thought this was an inheritance question: it was an ArrayList question all along!

Ok, my problem is more specific than I thought. So I have two families of

Answer 1

First of all, it's usually better practice to use getter/setter methods than accessing properties directly, especially if you're going to be doing a lot of complicated inheritance.

As for the generics problem, you could try defining the cardBox getter in the superclass (or top-level interface/abstract class) as:

protected ArrayList getCardBox();

That way you can ovverride it in subclasses and have them return a list of any type of subclass of Card.