Advanced enum handling with generics

Question

Hi everybody,
i am looking for an optimal solution for my enum issue:
I got a group of different enums all implementing my Interface XYZ. I create the interface to be sure all enums containing an additional property value
Here is my problem: Instead of writing a valueForProperty(String property) -method for every enum i have created a method that can be used by all my enums that implements the interface XYZ.
public Enum<?> valueForProperty(String propertyValue, Enum<? extends XYZ>... enums){
}- The good thing about this method is, that i can only put enums of type XYZ in it
- the bad thing is that i have to make a cast when using this method because the return value is only an enum
IWantThisEnum enum = (IWantThisEnum)this.valueForProperty("thisIsAPropertyValue", IWantThisEnum.values());Has anyone an idea to avoid that cast here?
Best regards
Edited by: user8973009 on 14.01.2013 15:23
Edited by: user8973009 on 14.01.2013 15:23

Answer 1

user8973009 wrote:
E extends Enum...why i miss this ... Its not so difficult. Look at the "solution" again (respect to zarr for producing it btw) - sure it works but is it still human readable? Not really! Java (the language) used to be so easy to read, but when you start to over-apply generics it becomes a hard to remember syntactical mess. IMO of course.