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Message:

RTTI and class hierarchy

Posted by Simon Bonner on June 19, 2001 at 8:18 AM

Hi,

I'm a Java newbie currently working through Bruce Eckel's book 'Thinking in Java'. I just got to the chapter on RTTI and I have a question that the book doesn't seem to answer. If you have a base class from which several other classes are derived, e.g.

class Shape {}
class Square extends Shape {}
class Circle extends Shape {}
class Triangle extends Shape {}

Is there any way of starting with the 'Shape' class, and determining what classes are derived from 'Shape'. I.e. can I do something like

Class subclassesofShape[] = Shape.class.getSubClasses();

...and receive an array containing the classes 'Square', 'Circle' and 'Triangle'?

TIA,
Simon Bonner