Generics & Inheritance Question

I have an inheritance structure that forms a tree of classes of Nodes.
One shared property of these classes is to be able to manage a list of classes
of type Node or a sub-type of Node.

Can this be done without creating an "unchecked" exception?

Code:

---

public class Node {
    private List<Node> list_ = null;
    private List<? extends Node> listSrc_ = null;
    private List<? super Node> listSink_ = null;
 
    public <N extends Node> void add(N node) {
        if (list_ == null) {
            list_ = new ArrayList<Node>();
            listSrc_  = list_;
            listSink_ = list_;
        }
        listSink_.add(node);
    }
 
    @SuppressWarnings("unchecked") //Any way to avoid this?
    public <N extends Node> N get(int n) {
        if ((list_ == null) || (n >= list_.size())) return null;
        return (N)listSrc_.get(n); //causes unchecked warning:
    }
}
 
class Bnode extends Node { // ...}
 
class Cnode extends Bnode { // ... }
//etc.

---

Don't think so, not in it's current form. listSrc_.get() could return anything that subclasses Node, which is not necessarily compatible with N (e.g., can't cast a JTable to a JPanel, even though both extend JComponent)

Thanks for the reply. Is there a better form to do this?

Lee.

Based only on the code shown, I don't see that you are not gaining anything by all the generics, apart from typing your ArrayList as Node. Your add() method always adds a subclass of Node; you don't care what it is. Your get() method does the same, and I don't know what the compiler is doing with N, since the type is erased at compile time, and you don't know what you are returning until run time.

Try removing all the generic references, apart from List<Node>. Make add() and get() use Node. See if you still get the desired results.