Question

I have created a JAX-WS client within eclipse that will communicate with a web service that was written in VB.net. I have gotten this to work successfully.

One of my web service methods will return an obect of type KitchenItems[]

The KitchenItems has a bunch of get/set methods for various kitchen properties. However, I cannot access those methods when using KitchenItems[]

Do the brackets convert the object into an array? How can I gain access to the get methods in KitchenItems? I had a test class automatically generated which did the following in order to extract the results:

KitchenItem[] kitchenItem= soap.getKitchenItemsByLoginId(kitchenId);
List list = Arrays.asList(kitchenItem.);
String result = list.toString();

Ideally, I would like to work with the object, and not convert to a string. The above won’t let me convert the array to as a list anyway, as it throws the error:

Type mismatch: cannot convert from List<KitchenItem> to List

Any suggestions? Thanks!

Answer 1

Square brackets on the variable’s type, KitchenItem[], or on the variable’s name, kitchenItem[], indicate that this variable is an array.

The elements of an array are accessed with the square brackets operator where the first element is accessed as kitchenItem[0] and arrays have a length field for determining the number of elements in the array.

Assume we have the array of items:

KitchenItem[] kitchenItems = soap.getKitchenItemsByLoginId(kitchenId);

To print the name of the first element in the array:

System.out.println(kitchenItems[0].getName());

To print the name of the last element in the array:

System.out.println(kitchenItems[kitchenItems.length - 1].getName());

One could print all the name of each KitchenItem with this code:

KitchenItem[] kitchenItems = soap.getKitchenItemsByLoginId(kitchenId);
for (int i = 0; i < kitchenItems; i++) {
    KitchenItem kitchenItem = kitchenItems[i];
    System.out.println(kitchenItem.getName());
}

The array can be turned into a genericized List using

List<KitchenItem> list = Arrays.asList(kitchenItem);

However the code you have may not be working because of the extra . on the end or because you have strict checking on in Eclipse. A genericized List should be assignable to a simple List.