Question

I’m cleaning up some code, and I have a class with an entity that implement a lot of the same behaviour. Should I combine that behaviour into a parent that both inherit or is there a reason to keep them separate?

(There are also some transfers of data between the entity and normal class that would be made easier if I could upcast to a method that would pass data between them)

Also what to do about the database specific additions to the shared variable?

For example, in the below code, should I create a class MyBase and extract prop1 plus its getters and setters to the MyBase class and then have MyObject and MyObjectEntity both extend MyBase?

Normal:

public class MyObject {
    private String prop1;

    public MyObject() {}

    public String getProp1() {
       return prop1;
    }

    public void setProp1(String prop1) {
       this.prop1 = prop1;
    }

    public void doSomethingNormal() {
       //Do something normal
    }
}

Entity:

@Entity
public class MyObjectEntity
{
    @Column(unique = true, nullable = false)
    private String prop1;

    public MyObjectEntity() {}

    public String getProp1() {
       return prop1;
    }

    public void setProp1(String prop1) {
       this.prop1 = prop1;
    }
    public void doSomethingEntity() {
       //Do something entity like
    }
}

Answer 1

I ended up being unable to do this as it caused problems with my old serialized objects, and settled for re factoring as much as I could within the class.