Question

I would like to know what to think when I type out what should be a perfectly good method, but it doesn’t get recognized as a method. Here it is.

private GObject getCollidingObject() {
    gobj = getElementAt(ball.getX(),ball.getY());
    if (gobj != null) {
        return gobj;
    }
    gobj = getElementAt(ball.getX()+BALL_RADIUS,ball.getY());
    if (gobj != null) {
        return gobj;
    }
    gobj = getElementAt(ball.getX(),ball.getY()+BALL_RADIUS);
    if (gobj != null) {
        return gobj;
    }
    gobj = getElementAt(ball.getX()+BALL_RADIUS,ball.getY()+BALL_RADIUS);
    if (gobj != null) {
        return gobj;
    }
}

Now eclipse is telling me that “This method must return a result of type GObject,” and is NOT highlighting the GObject in purple, which is its usual way of telling me that it is happy with my work.

What should I be thinking? I looked carefully over all my open-closed brackets and all my other methods are working, so I don’t think I have it placed this method within the wrong scope…

At the bottom of my program with all my other instance variables, I had

private GObject gobj;

But that doesn’t seem to be helping me out.

Thanks for any pointers.

Answer 1

The compiler is complaining that your gobj is not declared as a GObject. It doesn’t matter what it actually is a an instance of, it needs to either be declared to be the return type (or one of its sublcasses/implemented classes or interfaces) or be successfully cast as such.

What is gobj declared as?

EDIT:
And of course, you need to ensure that there is a return statement for in EVERY case.
You do not have a default that would be hit if all of your if statements evaluate to false.