Question

This is again, I guess, a ‘best practices’ question because i can think of some inelegant ways of getting my use case implemented.

My use case is as follows
Im writing a MethodManager(sort of) module which helps in the end user dealing with actual method(function) calls through a UI.
For this specific purpose i have a methodDefinition class which is an object form of what a method(function) looks like to my system.
A brief overview of what my methodDefinition’s members look like is as follows

methodName -- String
methodInputs -- ArrayList<String>
methodResultType -- enum(STRING,MAP,LIST)
methodResult  -- <<variable, on the basis of methodResultType>>

Now methodResult is variable and can be any of String, Map or List based on what methodResultType is set as.

I have created a MethodResultType class to account for methodResultType and it looks as follows

public enum MethodResultType {
    LIST,
    MAP,
    STRING;
    }

Now i know i have to write a class to account for methodResult and its variable nature based on methodResultType but cant think of a non botched up way to.

Any suggestions/ pointers in this regard would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
p1ng

Answer 1

List, Map and String have a common ancestor class: java.lang.Object. methodResult can thus be an Object.

You could also wrap the result and its type into a MethodResult object, that would provide methods such as getType(), getValueAsString(), getValueAsList() and getValueAsMap(). These last three methods would throw an IllegalStateException if the type of the value is not the type returned by the method.