Question

I have a class which is implementing an interface, and one of the methods is called onClick. Is there a way to implement the onClick that the interface wants but name it something else? Something like (and I’m making this up):

public void AnyMethodNameIWant() implements Interface1.onClick

Three reasons I’m asking are:

1. It would be nice to look at an method signature and know that it’s
   coming from an interface
2. To avoid ‘generic’ names like onClick that an interface may require me to have
3. To distinguish between the same method names in many interfaces

Apologies if this is a fundamentally ‘bad’ question as I am new to Java.

Answer 1

No, you can’t. Interfaces have to be implemented by a method of the same name in Java.

You can use the @Override annotation with interface implementations (as of Java 6) though, which helps to clarify that this is a method which can’t just be renamed arbitrarily.

One option for your second issue might be to create an implementation class just for the purpose of forwarding on the call to a more specific method. You might want to do this as a nested or even anonymous class. I’m not sure I’d usually do this though.

EDIT: Having seen the third question – no, if you have two interfaces with the same method signature in Java, you can only provide one implementation 🙁 Oh, and if you’ve got two interfaces with the same signature but different return types, it’s even worse. You could always write a method of Interface1 getInterface1() which returns an instance of an anonymous inner class proxying the Interface1 methods onto the “main” class.