Question

This question may sound silly, but I have no idea how to solve this:

I have some enumerated classes that model some constants for an application I’m developing, e.g.:

public enum Daily{GROCERIES, SUPPLIES,....}

public enum Monthly{NEWSPAPER, MAGAZINES,....}

public enum BiMonthly{....}

And let’s say I have an object that has a field modeled after any of the previous enums:

public class SomeObject{
    ...

    private Daily/Monthly/ByMonthly category;

    ...
}

how can I model this? I don’t know if putting all of the enums in a class and making the field of my object of type Something<E extends Enum> or making an interface with no methods that all my enums implement and making the field of my object of type EnumInterface.

Thanks

Answer 1

I think you should structure your Enums/Classes differently. Something like:

public enum Recurrence {
    DAILY,
    MONTHLY,
    BIMONTHLY
}

public enum Distributions {
    GROCERIES(Recurrence.DAILY),
    SUPPLIES(Recurrence.DAILY),
    NEWSPAPER(Recurrence.MONTHLY),
    MAGAZINES(Recurrence.BIMONTHLY);

    private Recurrence recurrence;

    private Distributions(Recurrence recurrence) {
        this.recurrence = recurrence;
    }

    public Recurrence getRecurrence() {
        return this.recurrence;
    }
}

public class SomeObject{
    ...

    private Distributions distribution;

    ...
}