Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
It is best practice not to expose the internal references of an Object (Entity). So if an Object has a field of type java.util.Date then for example the getter for this field should return not the original date but an copy of it.
But for an java.util.Date there are two common ways to create that copy:
(Date) originalDate.clone()new Date(originalDate.getTime()) My question is, which way is better, and why?
If it’s definitely just a
Date, it won’t make any difference either way.If the actual object might be a subclass of
Date(such asjava.sql.Date) then I’d hope thatclone()would preserve the extra information (including which class it is) whereas calling the constructor wouldn’t.As an aside, if you used Joda Time you wouldn’t have this problem, as there are plenty of immutable types to use. It’s also a much better API 🙂