Question

I have one class called Person that basically looks like:

public class Person
{
    String firstName;
    String lastName;
    String telephone;
    String email;

    public Person()
    {
       firstName = "";
       lastName = "";
       telephone = "";
       email = "";
    }

    public Person(String firstName, String lastName, String telephone, String email) 
    {
        this.firstName = firstName;
        this.lastName = lastName;
        this.telephone = telephone;
        this.email = email;
    }

    public String getFirstName()
    {
        return firstName;
    }

    public void setFirstName(String firstName)
    {
        this.firstName = firstName;
    }
 ....

Using that class, I setup an abstract class called Loan that looks like:

public abstract class Loan
{   
    public void setClient(Person client)
    {
        this.client = client;
    }

    public Person getClient()
    {
        return client;
    }

    public void setLoanId(int nextId)
    {
        loanId = nextId;
        nextId++;
    }

    public int getLoanId()
    {
        return loanId;
    }

    public void setInterestRate(double interestRate)
    {
        this.interestRate = interestRate;
    }

    public double getInterestRate()
    {
        return interestRate;
    }

    public void setLoanLength(int loanLength)
    {
        this.loanLength = loanLength;
    }

    public int getLoanLength()
    {
        return loanLength;
    }

    public void setLoanAmount(double loanAmount)
    {
        this.loanAmount = loanAmount;
    }

    public double getLoanAmount(double loanAmount)
    {
        return loanAmount;
    }

    private Person client;
    private int loanId;
    private double interestRate;
    private int loanLength;
    private double loanAmount;
    private static int nextId = 1;

}

I have to extend the Loan class with CarLoan and it looks like:

public class CarLoan extends Loan
{
    public CarLoan(Person client, double vehiclePrice, double downPayment, double salesTax,
                    double interestRate, CAR_LOAN_TERMS length)
    {
        super.setClient(client);
        super.setInterestRate(interestRate);
        this.client = client;
        this.vehiclePrice = vehiclePrice;
        this.downPayment = downPayment;
        this.salesTax = salesTax;
        this.length = length;

    }

    public void setVehiclePrice(double vehiclePrice)
    {
        this.vehiclePrice = vehiclePrice;
    }

    public double getVehiclePrice()
    {
        return vehiclePrice;
    }

    public void setDownPayment(double downPayment)
    {
        this.downPayment = downPayment;
    }

    public double getDownPayment()
    {
        return downPayment;
    }

    public void setSalesTax(double salesTax)
    {
        this.salesTax = salesTax;
    }

    public double getSalesTax()
    {
        return salesTax;
    }

    public String toString()
    {
        return getClass().getName() + "[vehiclePrice = " + vehiclePrice + '\n' 
                                        + "downPayment = " + downPayment + '\n'
                                        + "salesTax = " + salesTax 
                                        + "]";
    }

    public enum CAR_LOAN_TERMS {TWO_YEAR, THREE_YEAR, SIX_YEAR};
    private double vehiclePrice;
    private double downPayment;
    private double salesTax;

Few questions.

(a) Is what I did in the Loan class to setClient correct given what I have in the Person class? (e.g.this.client = client)

(b) Can I call super twice in a method? I have to set two attributes from the Loan class from the constructor in the CarLoan class and I thought that would be a way to do it.

(c) Do you have to set attributes for enumeration types differently in a constructor or getter/setter methods? I get an error for (this.length = length) in my CarLoan class and I was unsure of how enumeration values should be set. Thanks!

Answer 1

OK, in order:

1. setClient Looks perfectly fine. Nothing wrong with it. However, you want to avoid setting this.client directly in the CarLoan constructor—you’re already calling setClient (thanks to @Gabriel and @Aeth).
2. Sure, you can use super to access the parent class methods as much as you want. What you need to be careful with is calling the superclass’ constructor, which you can only do once and at the beginning of the subclass’ constructor. super != super().
3. Nope, this.length = length is fine. The problem is that you don’t have a field called length. You might want to add one of those.