Question

hi i am a totally new guy on JAVA OO concepts ,and this is my first time programming,i am currently stuck on how to create a registration class and a class which will store all the registration info, this is what i have done, 4 classes, a Account class, a Staff class extend Account,a Student class extend Account, and a dataStorage class to store the informations and to extract them when needed.

public class Account {

 private String name;
 private String department;
 private String username;
 private String password;

 public Account()
 {
 } 
    public Account(String nm,String dep,String user,String pass) 
    {
     name = nm;
       department = dep;
     username = user;
     password = pass;
    }

    public void setName(String nm)
    {
     name = nm;
    }

    public String getName()
    {
    ..... other accessors
}

/**/

public class Student extends Account {

 private String studentNRIC;
 private String studentID;

 public Student(String n, String nr, String id, String dep, String user, String pass)
 {
  super(n, dep, user, pass);
  studentNRIC = nr;
  studentID = id;
 }

    public void setStudentNRIC(String nr)
    {
     studentNRIC = nr;
    }

    public String getStudentNRIC()
    {
     return studentNRIC;
    }
    ....accessors

}

/**/

public class Staff extends Account {

 private String staffID;

 public Staff(String n, String id, String dep, String user, String pass)
 {
  super(n, dep, user, pass);
  staffID = id; 
 }

    public void setStaffID(String id)
    {
     staffID = id;
    }

    public String getStaffID()
    {
     return staffID;
    }


}

/****/
import java.util.*;

public class DataStorage 
{
    ArrayList<Account> staff = new ArrayList<Account>();      
    ArrayList<Account> student = new ArrayList<Account>();  

    public DataStorage(Staff aAcc) 
    {
     staff.add(aAcc);
    }

    public DataStorage(Student aAcc)
    {
     student.add(aAcc);
    }

    public String msg()
    {
     Staff sf = staff.get(0);


    return staff;
    }
}

Answer 1

It looks good so far. One thing that you could do is to move the ID (staffID and studentID) up to the Account class, calling it something like accountID. It seems that all accounts that you create need an ID, so moving this up makes sense.

One benefit of this would be to simplify your DataStorage class by having a single Collection. Even if you would like to keep your Staff and Students separate, you could also use Map instead of a List in DataStorage, as this would make lookups faster and easier.