Data classes seem to be the replacement to the old-fashioned POJOs in Java. It is quite expectable that these classes would allow for inheritance, but I can see no convenient way to extend a data class. What I need is something like this:
open data class Resource (var id: Long = 0, var location: String = "")
data class Book (var isbn: String) : Resource()
The code above fails because of clash of component1()
methods. Leaving data
annotation in only one of classes does not do the work, too.
Perhaps there is another idiom to extend data classes?
UPD: I might annotate only child child class, but data
annotation only handles properties declared in the constructor. That is, I would have to declare all parent's properties open
and override them, which is ugly:
open class Resource (open var id: Long = 0, open var location: String = "")
data class Book (
override var id: Long = 0,
override var location: String = "",
var isbn: String
) : Resource()
The truth is: data classes do not play too well with inheritance. We are considering prohibiting or severely restricting inheritance of data classes. For example, it's known that there's no way to implement equals()
correctly in a hierarchy on non-abstract classes.
So, all I can offer: don't use inheritance with data classes.
Declare properties in super-class outside of constructor as abstract, and override them in sub-class.
abstract class Resource {
abstract var id: Long
abstract var location: String
}
data class Book (
override var id: Long = 0,
override var location: String = "",
var isbn: String
) : Resource()
Above solution using abstract class actually generates corresponding class and let the data class extends from it.
If you don't prefer abstract class, how about using an interface?
Interface in Kotlin can have properties as shown in this this article..
interface History {
val date: LocalDateTime
val name: String
val value: Int
}
data class FixedHistory(override val date: LocalDateTime,
override val name: String,
override val value: Int,
val fixedEvent: String) : History
I was curious how Kotlin compile this. Here's equivalent Java code (generated using the Intellij [Kotlin bytecode] feature):
public interface History {
@NotNull
LocalDateTime getDate();
@NotNull
String getName();
int getValue();
}
public final class FixedHistory implements History {
@NotNull
private final LocalDateTime date;
@NotNull
private final String name;
private int value;
@NotNull
private final String fixedEvent;
// Boring getters/setters as usual..
// copy(), toString(), equals(), hashCode(), ...
}
As you can see, it works exactly like a normal data class!
You can inherit a data class from a non-data class. Inheriting a data class from another data class is not allowed because there is no way to make compiler-generated data class methods work consistently and intuitively in case of inheritance.