In this example we shall show you how to implement the Cloneable interface. A class implements the Cloneable interface to indicate to the Object.clone() method that it is legal for that method to make a field-for-field copy of instances of that class. To implement the Cloneable interface we have performed the following steps:
- We have created a class,
Employeethat implements the Cloneable interface and in its overridenclone()method it calls the super classclone()method and throws a CloneNotSupportedException, in case the object should not be cloned. - We create a new
Employeeobject and print out its fields’ values.
Then we get a clone object of the object and print out its fields’ values, that are equal to the original object’s fields’ values,
as described in the code snippet below.
package com.javacodegeeks.snippets.core;
public class ClonableClass {
public static void main(String[] args) {
try {
Employee e1 = new Employee("Dolly", 1000);
System.out.println(e1);
System.out.println("The employee's name is " + e1.getN());
System.out.println("The employees's pay is " + e1.getP());
Employee e1Clone = (Employee) e1.clone();
System.out.println(e1Clone);
System.out.println("The clone's name is " + e1Clone.getN());
System.out.println("The clones's pay is " + e1Clone.getP());
} catch (CloneNotSupportedException cnse) {
System.out.println("Clone not supported");
}
}
}
class Employee implements Cloneable {
String n;
int pay;
public Employee(String name, int salary) {
this.n = name;
this.pay = salary;
}
public Employee() {
}
public String getN() {
return n;
}
public void setN(String name) {
this.n = name;
}
public void setP(int pay) {
this.pay = pay;
}
public int getP() {
return this.pay;
}
@Override
public Object clone() throws CloneNotSupportedException {
try {
return super.clone();
} catch (CloneNotSupportedException cnse) {
System.out.println("CloneNotSupportedException thrown " + cnse);
throw new CloneNotSupportedException();
}
}
}
Output:
methodoverloading.Employee@e9f784d
The employee's name is Dolly
The employees's pay is 1000
methodoverloading.Employee@7930ebb
The clone's name is Dolly
The clones's pay is 1000
This was an example of how to implement the Cloneable interface in Java.
