String & Int in Bean

Question

Hi,
i'm building a webapp to simply allow the user to enter his or her details which will be submitted with all the details stored in the bean. When deciding to either make properties such as age or telephone number as string or int in a bean, i read somewhere that it is a rule of phumb to set these properties as Strings as they are easier to validate. If that is the case, if i create a property of String age with it's corresponding getter and setter method i.e
public void setAge(String n) {
    age = n ;
public String getAge()
   return age;
doing something like the above would not convert the value into an int which is what i would like to do. Therefore, i was thinking of doing the following in my bean class:
package beans ;
public class Person
private int age ;
// Constructor
public Person() {
    age = 0 ;
public void setAge(int n) {
    age = n ;
  public void setAge(String s) {
    try {
      age = Integer.parseInt(s) ;
    catch (NumberFormatException e) {}
  public int getAge() {
    return age ;
  }doing the above would i think be more convenient. Would that be the better way do you think?
cheers

Answer 1

BigDaddyLoveHandles wrote:
raychen wrote:
There's nothing wrong with what you are doing, however.I disagree. First that code doesn't belong in a bean. An then it has to be dupilcated across every bean and every "int" property. Plus I disagree with the way it swallows formatting errors.BigXXXXXwhatever...... what do you mean by that code does not belong in the bean. I've seen my example duplicated in many exampls and in books. I'm not to concerned if it has to be duplicated in every bean and int, it's not what i was asking.
In terms of the fomatting errors, what errors? Do i need to correct something?
Thanks for your input raychen.
Edited by: nvidia1 on Jan 6, 2009 12:19 AM