Inheriting static variable from abstract class

Question

I have half a dozen classes which all extend the same abstract class. The abstract class has a static variable pointing to some JNI code that I only want to load once per instantiation of the classes.

From what I understand this results in exactly one instance of this static variable being instantiated, but what I want is for each of the extending classes to have their own static instance of the variable that is unique for the given child class. I want to write some code in my abstract class that modifies and/or releases the abstract class. Is it possible to do both of these things at once?

So as an example can I write an abstract class bar with an variable foo and a printFoo method which prints the content of foo. Then I instantiate in order fooBar1, fooBar2, and fooBar3 which each extend the bar class and initialize foo to different values in static blocks. If I call foobar1.printFoo I want to print the static value of foo initialized by fooBar1 constructor.

Can this be done in java?

Answer 1

You can approximate it, but you will need separate static variables for each subclass, to stop subclasses overwriting each others values. It's easiest to abstract this via a getter getFoo so that each subclass fetches the foo from the right place.

Something like this

abstract class Bar
{
   // you don't have to have this in the base class 
   // - you could leave out the variable and make
   // getFoo() abstract.
   static private String foo;

   String getFoo() {
     return foo;
   }

   public void printFoo() {
      System.out.print(getFoo());
   }
}

class Foo1 extends Bar
{
   static final String foo1;

   public String getFoo() {
      return foo1;  // return our foo1 value
   }

   public Foo1() {
      foo1 = "myfoo1";
   }
}


class Foo2 extends Foo1
{
   static final String foo2;

   public String getFoo() {
      return foo2;  // return our foo2 value
   }

   public Foo2() {
      foo2 = "myfoo2";
   }
}

Answer 2

I have a similar problem. Looks like Java can't isolate static members (attributes). I ended up adding an abstract method instead of the attribute:

public abstract class Abs {
    public void printX() {
        System.out.println("For " + this.getClass() + " x=" + getX());
    }

    protected abstract Integer getX();

}

public class A extends Abs {
    protected static Integer x = 1;

    @Override
    protected Integer getX() {
        return x;
    }

}

public class B extends Abs {
    protected static Integer x = 2;

    @Override
    protected Integer getX() {
        return x;
    }

}

public class test {

    public static void main(String args[]) {
        Abs a = new A();
        a.printX();
        Abs b = new B();
        b.printX();
        Abs c = new A();
        a.printX();
        b.printX();
        c.printX();

    }
}