Question

In my android application I have some fields like

MyButton a;
MyEditText b;
MySpinner c;
MyTextView d;

Each of these is like public class MyButton extends Button implements InfoExtract and

public interface InfoExtract{
    String getTheText();
}

Out of these fields (the user can change some of them), there is a UserProfile to be created like so:

public class ProfileUpdate {
    // The fields have to be string no matter what
    String firstName;
    String lastName;
    String dateOfBirth;
    String relationshipStatus
}

The execution flow is like that:

List<InfoExtract> uiElements = new ArrayList<InfoExtract>();
uiElements.add(a);
uiElements.add(b);
uiElements.add(c);
uiElements.add(d);
someButton.setOnClickListener(new SaveProfileListener(uiElements);

The SaveProfileListener more or less does this:

ProfileUpdate pup = new ProfileUpdate();
int i = 0;
pup.firstName = uiElements.get(i++).getTheText()
pup.lastName = uiElements.get(i++).getTheText();
pup.dateOfBirth = uiElements.get(i++).getTheText();
pup.relationshipStatus = uiElements.get(i++).getTheText();

Bad thing #1: If I want to add another fields its obviously much work.

Bad thing #2: The order of elements in the list is important.

Bad thing #3: I cannot easily manipulate the date format for dateOfBirth for example.

What i could have done but what is equally bad:

// Pass the listener what fields it should use.
someButton.setOnClickListener(new SaveProfileListener(a, b, c, d);

How to make this nice and clean?

Answer 1

I ended up using a Map and a new Enum type for each field.