Question

It seems that my implementation of toString() method in an Activity is never called no matter what I do. I always get result from java.lang.Object (like Ljava.lang.Object;@4059d6a8) instead of “I was called!”. I’ve read a bunch of articles and scanned through a lot of code and I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong. Could someone please explain to me how do I override the method? This is my code:

public class OverrideTestActivity extends Activity {
    private int number = 27;
    private String[] items = { "MyFirstItem", "MySecondItem" };
    public Object[] stuff = { number, items };

    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle bundle) {
        super.onCreate(bundle);
        setContentView(R.layout.test);
        OverrideTest();
    }

    public void OverrideTest() {
        TextView result = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.textView1);
        result.setText(stuff.toString());
    }

    @Override
    public String toString() {
        return "I was called!";
    }
}

Thanks a lot in advance!

Answer 1

In this case, the toString() is called only on objects of type OverrideTestActivity.

Instead you are calling toString() on an array, which doesn’t have such an implementation.

private int number = 27;
private String[] items = { "MyFirstItem", "MySecondItem" };
public Object[] stuff = { number, items }; 

If you did something like this

List<Object> stuff = Arrays.asList(27, "MyFirstItem", "MySecondItem");
stuff.toString();

You would find that it outputs a format that represents the contents of the List. The format will have been determined by the toString() method on the List implementation.