OOP in Java: Class inheritance with method chaining

Question

I have a parent class, which defines a collection of chainer methods (methods that return \"this\"). I want to define multiple child classes that contain their own chainer

Answer 1

You can just cast it.

ChainChild child = new ChainChild();
((ChainChild) child.foo()).bar();

You could try:

public ? extends Chain foo() {
    return this;
}

But I'm not sure that will help, even if it compiles.