086bInitialising Fields Before Superconstructor Call (Follow-Up)

Author: Dr. Heinz M. KabutzDate: 2004-03-20Java Version: 1.4Category: Tips and Tricks

Abstract: Follow-up to show another approach that works even better for initializing fields prior to the call to super().

Gidado-Yisa Immanuel sent me another approach that is a bit simpler to write, hence should reduce the possibility of bugs. Instead of using a static field, and worrying about concurrent access, why not rather just use a ThreadLocal? I must admit that I have never used ThreadLocals because of the problems in previous versions of Java, so that was an option I did not consider.

import javax.swing.*;

public class CustomerView4 extends FormView1 {
  private static final ThreadLocal tempType = new ThreadLocal();
  private Integer type;
  public CustomerView4(JFrame owner, int type) {
    super(hackToPieces(owner, type));
  }
  private static JFrame hackToPieces(JFrame owner, int type) {
    tempType.set(new Integer(type));
    return owner;
  }
  private void init() {
    type = (Integer) tempType.get();
  }
  public JComponent makeUI() {
    init();
    switch (type.intValue()) {
      case 0:
        return new JTextArea();
      case 1:
        return new JTextField();
      default:
        return new JComboBox();
    }
  }
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    CustomerView4 view = new CustomerView4(null, 1);
    System.out.println(view.getMainUIComponent().getClass());
  }
}

This certainly looks simpler than my approach, so rather use Gidado's solution than mine, even though mine is marginally faster (about 1%). And even better than Gidado's solution would be to change the framework :-)

Kind regards from

Heinz

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