Question

I’m new to Java so please be gentle…

Consider the following ShoppingList Class:

public class ShoppingList {
...
    public ItemPrices[] getSortedPrices(){
        //do sorting stuff here etc
        return ret.toArray(new ItemPrices[0]);
    }
}

And now I have another class called Hello:

public class Hello {
...
    private Groceries createGroceries() {
    ...
         pricearray[] =  ShoppingList.ItemPrices[] //????
    ...
    }
}

I want to assign the array pricearray I’ve created to equal to ItemPrices array returned in the method.

However I’m not getting what I want, what’s the correct way to doing this?

Answer 1

Unless the method getSortedPrices is a static method, you need to call it from an instance of the ShoppingList class, so you should create an instance as follows

public class Hello {
...
    private Groceries createGroceries() {
    ...
        ShoppingList sList = new ShoppingList();
        PriceList [] pricearray =  sList.getSortedPrices() //you call a method by its name, not return type.
    ...
    }
}

also, I dont see how

(ItemPrices[] is a double).

is it supposed to be an array of doubles, or an array of instance of the class ItemPrices?
if its supposed to be an array of doubles, you need to do this:

public class ShoppingList {
...
    public double[] getSortedPrices(){
        //do sorting stuff here etc
        return new double[n] // n is the length of the array
    }
}

and the line

PriceList [] pricearray = sList.getSortedPrices()

should be

double [] pricearray = sList.getSortedPrices()