Java™ How to Program, 9/e

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 Inheritance
 A form of software reuse in which a new class is created by
absorbing an existing class’s members and embellishing them
with new or modified capabilities.
 Can save time during program development by basing new
classes on existing proven and debugged high-quality software.
 Increases the likelihood that a system will be implemented and
maintained effectively.

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 Figure 9.1 lists several simple examples of superclasses
and subclasses
 Superclasses tend to be “more general” and subclasses “more
specific.”
 Because every subclass object is an object of its
superclass, and one superclass can have many
subclasses, the set of objects represented by a
superclass is typically larger than the set of objects
represented by any of its subclasses.

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 A superclass exists in a hierarchical relationship with its
subclasses.
 Fig. 9.2 shows a sample university community class hierarchy
 Also called an inheritance hierarchy.
 Each arrow in the hierarchy represents an is-a relationship.
 Follow the arrows upward in the class hierarchy
 an Employee is a CommunityMember”
 “a Teacher is a Faculty member.”
 CommunityMember is the direct superclass of Employee,
Student and Alumnus and is an indirect superclass of all the
other classes in the diagram.
 Starting from the bottom, you can follow the arrows and apply
the is-a relationship up to the topmost superclass.

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 Fig. 9.3 shows a Shape inheritance hierarchy.
 Van follow the arrows from the bottom of the diagram

to the topmost superclass in this class hierarchy to

identify several is-a relationships.
 A Triangle is a TwoDimensionalShape and is a
Shape
 ASphere is a ThreeDimensionalShape and is a
Shape.

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 Not every class relationship is an inheritance
relationship.
 Has-a relationship

 Create classes by composition of existing classes.

 Example: Given the classes Employee, BirthDate and
TelephoneNumber, it’s improper to say that an
Employee is a BirthDate or that an Employee is a
TelephoneNumber.
 However, an Employee has a BirthDate, and an
Employee has a TelephoneNumber.

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 Objects of all classes that extend a common superclass
can be treated as objects of that superclass.
 Commonality expressed in the members of the superclass.
 Inheritance issue
 A subclass can inherit methods that it does not need or should
not have.
 Even when a superclass method is appropriate for a subclass,
that subclass often needs a customized version of the method.
 The subclass can override (redefine) the superclass method
with an appropriate implementation.

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 A class’s public members are accessible wherever the
program has a reference to an object of that class or one of
its subclasses.
 A class’s private members are accessible only within the
class itself.
 protected access is an intermediate level of access
between public and private.
 A superclass’s protected members can be accessed by members
of that superclass, by members of its subclasses and by members of
other classes in the same package
 protected members also have package access.
 All public and protected superclass members retain their
original access modifier when they become members of the subclass.

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 A superclass’s private members are hidden in its
subclasses
 They can be accessed only through the public or protected
methods inherited from the superclass
 Subclass methods can refer to public and protected
members inherited from the superclass simply by using the
member names.
 When a subclass method overrides an inherited superclass
method, the superclass method can be accessed from the
subclass by preceding the superclass method name with
keyword super and a dot (.) separator.

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 Inheritance hierarchy containing types of employees in
a company’s payroll application
 Commission employees are paid a percentage of their

sales
 Base-salaried commission employees receive a base

salary plus a percentage of their sales.

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 Class CommissionEmployee (Fig. 9.4) extends
class Object (from package java.lang).
 CommissionEmployee inherits Object’s methods.
 If you don’t explicitly specify which class a new class extends,
the class extends Object implicitly.

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 Constructors are not inherited.
 The first task of a subclass constructor is to call its

direct superclass’s constructor explicitly or implicitly

 Ensures that the instance variables inherited from the
superclass are initialized properly.
 If the code does not include an explicit call to the
superclass constructor, Java implicitly calls the
superclass’s default or no-argument constructor.
 A class’s default constructor calls the superclass’s

default or no-argument constructor.

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 toString is one of the methods that every class
inherits directly or indirectly from class Object.
 Returns a String representing an object.
 Called implicitly whenever an object must be converted to a
String representation.
 Class Object’s toString method returns a
String that includes the name of the object’s class.
 This is primarily a placeholder that can be overridden by a
subclass to specify an appropriate String representation.

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 To override a superclass method, a subclass must
declare a method with the same signature as the
superclass method
 @Override annotation

 Indicates that a method should override a superclass method

with the same signature.
 If it does not, a compilation error occurs.

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 Class BasePlusCommissionEmployee (Fig. 9.6)
contains a first name, last name, social security number,
gross sales amount, commission rate and base salary.
 All but the base salary are in common with class
CommissionEmployee.
 Class BasePlusCommissionEmployee’s public
services include a constructor, and methods earnings,
toString and get and set for each instance variable
 Most of these are in common with class
CommissionEmployee.

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 Class BasePlusCommissionEmployee does not
specify “extends Object”
 Implicitly extends Object.
 BasePlusCommissionEmployee’s constructor
invokes class Object’s default constructor implicitly.

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 Much of BasePlusCommissionEmployee’s code is
similar, or identical, to that of CommissionEmployee.
 private instance variables firstName and lastName
and methods setFirstName, getFirstName,
setLastName and getLastName are identical.
 Both classes also contain corresponding get and set methods.
 The constructors are almost identical
 BasePlusCommissionEmployee’s constructor also sets the
base-Salary.
 The toString methods are nearly identical
 BasePlusCommissionEmployee’s toString also outputs
instance variable baseSalary

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 We literally copied CommissionEmployee’s code,
pasted it into BasePlusCommissionEmployee,
then modified the new class to include a base salary
and methods that manipulate the base salary.
 This “copy-and-paste” approach is often error prone and time
consuming.
 It spreads copies of the same code throughout a system,
creating a code-maintenance nightmare.

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 Class BasePlusCommissionEmployee class extends
class CommissionEmployee
 A BasePlusCommissionEmployee object is a
CommissionEmployee
 Inheritance passes on class CommissionEmployee’s capabilities.
 Class BasePlusCommissionEmployee also has
instance variable baseSalary.
 Subclass BasePlusCommissionEmployee inherits
CommissionEmployee’s instance variables and
methods
 Only the superclass’s public and protected members are
directly accessible in the subclass.

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 Each subclass constructor must implicitly or explicitly call
its superclass constructor to initialize the instance variables
inherited from the superclass.
 Superclass constructor call syntax—keyword super, followed by a
set of parentheses containing the superclass constructor arguments.
 Must be the first statement in the subclass constructor’s body.
 If the subclass constructor did not invoke the superclass’s
constructor explicitly, Java would attempt to invoke the
superclass’s no-argument or default constructor.
 Class CommissionEmployee does not have such a constructor,
so the compiler would issue an error.
 You can explicitly use super() to call the superclass’s
no-argument or default constructor, but this is rarely done.
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 Compilation errors occur when the subclass attempts to
access the superclass’s private instance variables.
 These lines could have used appropriate get methods to

retrieve the values of the superclass’s instance

variables.

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 To enable a subclass to directly access superclass instance
variables, we can declare those members as protected in the
superclass.
 New CommissionEmployee class modified only lines 6–10
of Fig. 9.4 as follows:
protected String firstName;
protected String lastName;
protected String socialSecurityNumber;
protected double grossSales;
protected double commissionRate;
 With protected instance variables, the subclass gets access to
the instance variables, but classes that are not subclasses and
classes that are not in the same package cannot access these
variables directly.
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 Class BasePlusCommissionEmployee (Fig. 9.9) extends
the new version of class CommissionEmployee with
protected instance variables.
 These variables are now protected members of
BasePlusCommissionEmployee.
 If another class extends this version of class
BasePlusCommissionEmployee, the new subclass also
can access the protected members.
 The source code in Fig. 9.9 (51 lines) is considerably shorter than
that in Fig. 9.6 (128 lines)
 Most of the functionality is now inherited from
CommissionEmployee
 There is now only one copy of the functionality.
 Code is easier to maintain, modify and debug—the code related to a
commission employee exists only in class CommissionEmployee.

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 Class BasePlusCommissionEmployee
(Fig. 9.11) has several changes that distinguish it from
Fig. 9.9.
 Methods earnings and toString each invoke

their superclass versions and do not access instance

variables directly.

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