How to apply polymorphism in this object

Question

I have the following class

class Message{
    private List content;
    private String messageType;

    public Message(String messageType, List content){
       this.content = content;
       this.messageType = messageType;
    }
}

Okey, now imagine i want to send different message types. For example, the message type "friends". I want to store their ID number ( int for example) as a key to find their names ( String ). That reminds me that i should use the HashMap class. Or a simple String , whatever. And other more cases where i need to use other object types.

The main question here is: how i should proceed here to code a class that have two attributes:

• The first stores the type of the message
• The second is the content itself, which should be able to be any kind of object

I have read that casting is a bad practice, so i dont want to declare content as an object and then, cast it in function of the message type.

My thoughts:

• Declare message as an abstract class and then implement subclasses in function of the message type. What i dont get here is that if i declare an abstract method like getContent() in Message class, i need to stablish the data type that it returns, what get me back to the main issue. This way get useless since i need to send the Message and not the subclass.

Answer 1

You don't need messageType at all, you can just define a generic type with class and use it in content , eg:

class Message<T> {
    private List<T> content;

    public Message(List<T> content){
        this.content = content;
    }
}

Now, let's say if the type is String , you can do:

Message<String> message = new Message<>(new ArrayList<String>());

This way, you can instantiate Message class with different types. Here is the documentation on generic class types.

Answer 2

 class Message{
        private List content;
        private HashMap<String,Integer> messageType = new HashMap<String,Integer>();

        public Message(HashMap messageType, List content){
            this.content = content;
            this.messageType = messageType;
    }
    }

Does this code make sense???

Answer 3

You can have an interface that contains the common methods that apply to all message types and the have all the messages implement the Sendable interface.

Interface

 interface Sendable {
  public String getContent();
  public MessageType getMessageType();
}

Message Classes

public FriendMessage implements Sendable {

    private String title;
    private Map friends;
    private messageType = MessageType.Friends;

    public String getContent(){
     return title+ friends.toString();
     }

    public MessageType getMessageType() {
     return this.messageType;
   }
}

Enum

public Enum MessageType {
 Friends, NoFriends, Lonely
}

You should also have an Enum that will classify all your message types. This will allow you to determine the message type without having to do instanceof or string comparison.