Comparing two Objects which implement the same interface for equality / equivalence - Design help
- by gav
Hi All,
I have an interface and two objects implementing that interface, massively simplied;
public interface MyInterface {
public int getId();
public int getName();
...
}
public class A implements MyInterface {
...
}
public class B implements MyInterface {
...
}
We are migrating from using one implementation to the other but I need to check that the objects of type B that are generated are equivalent to those of type A. Specifically I mean that for all of the interface methods an object of Type A and Type B will return the same value (I'm just checking my code for generating this objects is correct).
How would you go about this?
Map<String, MyInterface> oldGeneratedObjects = getOldGeneratedObjects();
Map<String, MyInterface> newGeneratedObjects = getNewGeneratedObjects();
// TODO: Establish that for each Key the Values in the two maps return equivalent values.
I'm looking for good coding practices and style here. I appreciate that I could just iterate through one key set pulling out both objects which should be equivalent and then just call all the methods and compare, I'm just thinking there may be a cleaner, more extensible way and I'm interested to learn what options there might be.
Would it be appropriate / possible / advised to override equals or implement Comparable?
Thanks in advance,
Gavin
