Question

I’m working on a homework project that requires me to create an object from data entered by a user. I have a class called Person which takes the basic information, a class called Customer which extends the Person class and includes a customer number and a class called Employee which extends the Person class and returns a social security number.

I have pasted the code from my main program below. I’m a little confused on a couple of things. First when I’m collecting the information (first name, last name etc) amd I supposed to be accessing my Person class in there somehow?

Second I guess more plainly, how do I create the object? so far in all of the examples I have read online I find they seem to enter the information already like if I were to have it say

    Person firstName = new Person(Jack);

Although I am collecting the information from the user so I don’t see how to tell it like

    Person firstName = new Person (enter info from user here);

Finally and again this is a really dumb question but I have to create a static method that accepts a Person object.
To create the static method I’m assuming it is

    Public Static print()

but how do I tell it to print something from the person class? how does it know?

Most of my examples in the book include a class that contains all of the information instead of making the user enter it which is confusing because now I’m being told the user has the freedom to type what they want and I need to collect that information.

    import java.util.Scanner;
    public class PersonApp 
    {


public static void main(String[] args) 
{
    //welcome user to person tester
    System.out.println("Welcome to the Person Tester Application");
    System.out.println();

    Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in);


    //set choice to y
    String choice = "y";
    while (choice.equalsIgnoreCase("y"))
    {

        //prompt user to enter customer or employee
        System.out.println("Create customer or employee (c/e): ");
        String input = in.nextLine();

        if (input.equalsIgnoreCase("c"))
        {
            String firstName = Validator.getString(in, "Enter first name: ");
            String lastName = Validator.getString(in, "Enter last name: ");
            String email = Validator.getEmail(in, "Enter email address: ");
            String custNumber = Validator.getString(in, "Customer number: ");
        }

        else if(input.equalsIgnoreCase("e"))
        {
            String firstName = Validator.getString(in, "Enter first name: ");
            String lastName = Validator.getString(in, "Enter last name: ");
            String email = Validator.getEmail(in, "Enter email address: ");
            int empSoc = Validator.getInt(in, "Social security number: ");
        }


    }




    System.out.println("Continue? y/n: ");
    choice = in.next();


}

}

Answer 1

First, I observe that there isn’t a Person object. I assume you’ll get around to creating that, so I’m not going to concern myself too much with it.

Insofar as actually getting the data, you’re halfway there. Depending on how you want to frame the Person object, you can create a new Customer or Employee object by passing the values which you received from the user.

Customer customer = new Customer(firstName, lastName, email, custNumber);

or

Employee employee = new Employee(firstName, lastName, email, empSoc);

Here’s the snippet of both:

public class Person {

    public Person (String first, String last, String email) {
        // You'd fill in code here for handling the variables
    }

    // ...
}

public class Customer extends Person {

    public Customer (String first, String last, String email, String custNo) {
        super(first, last, email);
        // You'd fill in code here for handling the variables
    }

    // ...
}

public class Employee extends Person {

    public Employee (int social) {
        super(first, last, email);
        // You'd fill in code here for handling the variables
    }

    // ...
}

---

To print something from the Person class, using that static method (why? You could override toString() instead), you frame it such that your Person object has accessors to each of the fields relevant to a Person. This would mean you have a getFirstName(), getLastName(), and so forth, relevant to the object if it’s an employee or a customer. (I leave that as an exercise to you.)

In that sense, one would then only require calls to those accessors to print the value.

public static void print(Person p) {

    System.out.println(p.getFirstName()) + " " + p.getLastName()); // You can get the trend from here.
}