oop - Access subclass fields from a base class in Java

Question

I have a base class called Geometry from which there exists a subclass Sphere:

public class Geometry 
{
 String shape_name;
 String material;

 public Geometry()
 {
     System.out.println("New geometric object created.");
 }
}

and a subclass:

public class Sphere extends Geometry
{
 Vector3d center;
 double radius;

 public Sphere(Vector3d coords, double radius, String sphere_name, String material)
 {
  this.center = coords;
  this.radius = radius;
  super.shape_name = sphere_name;
  super.material = material;
 }
}

I have an ArrayList that contains all Geometry objects and I want to iterate over it to check whether the data from a text file is read in correctly. Here is my iterator method so far:

public static void check()
 {
  Iterator<Geometry> e = objects.iterator();
  while (e.hasNext())
  {
   Geometry g = (Geometry) e.next();
   if (g instanceof Sphere)
   {
    System.out.println(g.shape_name);
    System.out.println(g.material);
   }
  }
 }

How do I access and print out the Sphere's radius and center fields? Thanks in advance :)

Answer 1

If you want to access properties of a subclass, you're going to have to cast to the subclass.

if (g instanceof Sphere)
{
    Sphere s = (Sphere) g;
    System.out.println(s.radius);
    ....
}

This isn't the most OO way to do things, though: once you have more subclasses of Geometry you're going to need to start casting to each of those types, which quickly becomes a big mess. If you want to print the properties of an object, you should have a method on your Geometry object called print() or something along those lines, that will print each of the properties in the object. Something like this:

class Geometry {
   ...
   public void print() {
      System.out.println(shape_name);
      System.out.println(material);
   }
}

class Shape extends Geometry {
   ...
   public void print() {
      System.out.println(radius);
      System.out.println(center);
      super.print();
   }
}

This way, you don't need to do the casting and you can just call g.print() inside your while loop.