Question

I’m working with the JPA API (Hibernate-backed), and have the following code:

public List<?> getGenericListing(Class<?> clazz) {
    //Other logic comes before...
    Query qry = entityManager.createNativeQuery(sql, clazz);
    return qry.getResultList(); //Returns an untyped list, part of JPA spec
}

public List<SpecificObject> getSpecificListing() {
    return (List<SpecificObject>) getGenericListing(SpecificObject.class);
}

Is there a better way to return the List<?> other than type-casting it against the List of SpecificObject?

Answer 1

You can put the cast into getGenericListing:

public <T> List<T> getGenericListing(Class<T> clazz) {
    //Other logic comes before...
    Query qry = entityManager.createNativeQuery(sql, clazz);
    return (List<T>) qry.getResultList(); //Returns an untyped list, part of JPA spec
}