Getting bogged down in generics

Question

I have several similar Adapter classes and I am trying to refactor up to a common abstract class. My class needs to hang on to an array of "model" objects. When I initialize that array I seem to be forced to accept a warning. I suppose this is fine, but I suspect the warning is trying to tell me there's a better way. I could declare the array as the NamedModel type instead of the ModelType, but that seems bad because I want to express that these will always be of the more restrictive class (hopefully this makes sense).
Here's my code:
public abstract class NamedModelAdapter<ModelType extends NamedModel> extends BaseAdapter {
     private ModelType[] mModels;
        private Map<Integer, ModelType> mModelsAsAMap;
     public NamedModelAdapter(Context context, Cursor cursor) {
                // this gives an error "Cannot create generic array of ModelType"
          // mModels = new ModelType[cursor.getCount()];
                // this gives a warning "Unchecked cast from NamedModel[] to ModelType[]
          mModels = (ModelType[]) new NamedModel[cursor.getCount()];
                // this gives an error "Cannot instantiate the type Map<Integer, ModelType>"
          //mModelsAsAMap = new Map<Integer, ModelType>(cursor.getCount());
// stuff deleted
}{code}
Looking this over, I'm getting the strong feeling I'm missing something.  Please go easy on me, I'm still new to Java :-).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Answer 1

As Walter indicated, generics and arrays do not mix well.
public abstract class NamedModelAdapter<T extends NamedModel> extends Object {
    private final T[] modelsAsArray;
    private final List<T> modelsAsList;
    private final Map<Integer, T> modelsAsMap;
    public NamedModelAdapter(final Context context, final Cursor cursor) {
        modelsAsArray = createGenericArray(cursor.getCount());
        modelsAsList = new ArrayList<T>();
        modelsAsMap = new HashMap<Integer, T>();
     * Note the following is inadvisable.  Mixing generics and arrays is generally bad.
     * @param   length                  Desired length of array
     * @return  T[]                     Unsafe generic array
    @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
    private T[] createGenericArray(final int length)
        return (T[]) new NamedModel[length];
}- Saish