Question

If I have an Enum as a helper in a Java class, is there any way to refer to that Enum outside of the class it’s helping?

Basically, what I have is this:

class Account extends MyClass {
    HashMap<Property, String> property = new HashMap<Property, String>();
    public Account() {
    }

    public enum Property {
        USERID,
        PASSWORD;
    }
}

I want to be able to access the Property enum outside of the Account class.

The reason I want to do this is because this is a subclass of a another, and I want to be able to access the properties of a given subclass without referring to a unique enum name (i.e.: without referring to each one as, say, AccountProperty or ResearchProperty or TaskProperty etc).

Answer 1

Your enum is public so you just can use Account.Property to access it from outside the Account class

EDIT :

If I got what you need, you’d like to do something like

Property p = Account.Property.PASSWORD;
Property p1 = Product.Property.CODE;

where Product is

public class Product extends MyClass{
    HashMap<Account.Property, String> property = new HashMap<>();
    public Product() {
    }

    public static enum Property {
        CODE,
        PRICE;
    }
}

and you want to do this in your MyClass.

The problem is that both the two lines require an import and you can’t import two classes with the same name, so the only solution is to do something like this

Account.Property p = Account.Property.PASSWORD;
Product.Property p1 = Product.Property.CODE;

I guess that you’ve got to deal with the instanceof to use the right Property enum for each class, as there’s no way to extend an enum!