Question

I get headaches when I have to write nearly 10 lines of code to say 2 Objects are equal, when their type is equal and both's attribute is equal. You can easily see that in this way of writing the number of lines increase drastically with your number of attributes.

public class Id implements Node {

        private String name;

        public Id(String name) {
                this.name = name;
        }

        public boolean equals(Object o) {
                if (o == null)
                        return false;
                if (null == (Id) o)
                        return false;
                Id i = (Id) o;
                if ((this.name != null && i.name == null) || (this.name == null && i.name != null))
                        return false;
                return (this.name == null && i.name == null) || this.name.equals(i.name);
        }

}

Answer 1

If you use Eclipse, click “Source” -> “generate hashCode() and equals()“. There’re many options to create equals() automatically.