How to instantiante object & call setter on same line?

Question

If I have an Employee class with a default constructor:

private String firstName;
public Employee(){}

and a setter:

Answer 1

Because the you want to set employee to the value of .setFirstName("John"); which does not return anything because it is a void

So you could either change your setter to:

public Employee setFirstName(String fname) {
  this.firstName = fname;
  return this;
}

OR Create a second constructor for Employee

public Employee(String fname){this.firstName = fname;}

Which would set firstname on init.

Answer 2

Because setFirstName doesn't return anything. If you want to chain methods then setFirstName would have to return Employee.

Another approach is to have a constructor that takes firstName as an argument.