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Generics are very useful. But sometimes, they don’t fullfil all required needs. Today, I had a small problem. Over the parameter of a method, a Class definition was passed. In the method, I had to cast an object of type Object into a concrete type (the concrete type was T, defined by Generics). The easiest way is to put the cast between a try and catch block. This will work, no question. But in my piece of code, a try and catch block wasn’t very nice. For this reason, I tried to check, if the object o is of the type clazz. Unfortunately, instanceof doesn’t work with dynamic defined classes. But there is a simple solution: just use the method isAssignableFrom.

private void test(Class<?> clazz) {
  // the Object o is from somewhere...
 
  if (o instanceof clazz) {
    // does not working
  } 
 
  if (o.getClass().isAssignableFrom(clazz)) {
    // is working
  }
}

I just found a really good Quick Reference sheet about the Design Patterns from the GoF (Gang of Four). Have a look at this blog.

Today I stumbled upon a nice solution, to use the Collections.EMPTY_LIST with Generics. Just use the method emptyList with Generics instead of the constant value.

For example:

Collections.<String> emtpyList();

We use JiBX in our current project and had the problem, that JiBX won’t trim whitespaces automatically. For example, a XML tag like <test> asdf  </test> get’s stored as “ asdf  “ instead of “asdf”.

To solve this problem, we created an user-defined formatter for Strings.

package ch.stefanjaeger.formatter; 
public class StringFormatter { 
  public static String trimString(String untrimmed) { 
    return untrimmed.trim(); 
  } 
}

Now just update the binding file of JiBX and JiBX will trim whitespaces:

<format 
deserializer="ch.stefanjaeger.formatter.StringFormatter.trimString" 
type="java.lang.String" />