Question

Suppose I have something like this:

public abstract class AbstractDataObject
{
   public abstract void gettableName();

   public void delete()
   {
      SQLQuery("..." + getTableName()+ "..." );
   }
}

public class DataObject extends AbstractDataObject
{
   final static String tableName;

   public String getTableName()
   {
      return tableName;
   }
}

I want method delete() to query a different table for each subclass of AbstractDataObject. So I override getTableName() just to pass a static constant that’s specific to each subclass. Would this be acceptable or bad practice?

Answer 1

I have done this a lot. Many a times writing a framework, the base class has a getType() or getName() or some such abstract method. The derived classes typically override this to return a static member’s value`