Extending from two classes

Solution 1:

You can only Extend a single class. And implement Interfaces from many sources.

Extending multiple classes is not available. The only solution I can think of is not inheriting either class but instead having an internal variable of each class and doing more of a proxy by redirecting the requests to your object to the object that you want them to go to.

 public class CustomActivity extends Activity {

     private AnotherClass mClass;

     protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
         super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
         mClass = new AnotherClass(this);
     }

     //Implement each method you want to use.
     public String getInfoFromOtherClass()
     {
        return mClass.getInfoFromOtherClass();
     }
 }

this is the best solution I have come up with. You can get the functionality from both classes and Still only actually be of one class type.

The drawback is that you cannot fit into the Mold of the Internal class using a cast.

Solution 2:

Why Not Use an Inner Class (Nesting)

class A extends B {
    private class C extends D {
        //Classes A , B , C , D accessible here 
    }
}

Solution 3:

As everyone else has said. No, you can't. However even though people have said many times over the years that you should use multiple interfaces they haven't really gone into how. Hopefully this will help.

Say you have class Foo and class Bar that you both want to try extending into a class FooBar. Of course, as you said, you can't do:

public class FooBar extends Foo, Bar

People have gone into the reasons for this to some extent already. Instead, write interfaces for both Foo and Bar covering all of their public methods. E.g.

public interface FooInterface {

    public void methodA();

    public int methodB();

    //...
} 

public interface BarInterface {

    public int methodC(int i);

    //...
}

And now make Foo and Bar implement the relative interfaces:

public class Foo implements FooInterface { /*...*/ }

public class Bar implements BarInterface { /*...*/ }

Now, with class FooBar, you can implement both FooInterface and BarInterface while keeping a Foo and Bar object and just passing the methods straight through:

public class FooBar implements FooInterface, BarInterface {

    Foo myFoo;
    Bar myBar;

    // You can have the FooBar constructor require the arguments for both
    //  the Foo and the Bar constructors
    public FooBar(int x, int y, int z){
        myFoo = new Foo(x);
        myBar = new Bar(y, z);
    }

    // Or have the Foo and Bar objects passed right in
    public FooBar(Foo newFoo, Bar newBar){
        myFoo = newFoo;
        myBar = newBar;
    }

    public void methodA(){
        myFoo.methodA();
    }

    public int methodB(){
        return myFoo.methodB();
    }

    public int methodC(int i){
        return myBar.methodC(i);
    }

    //...

}

The bonus for this method, is that the FooBar object fits the moulds of both FooInterface and BarInterface. That means this is perfectly fine:

FooInterface testFoo;
testFoo = new FooBar(a, b, c);
testFoo = new Foo(a);

BarInterface testBar;
testBar = new FooBar(a, b, c);
testBar = new Bar(b, c);

Hope this clarifies how to use interfaces instead of multiple extensions. Even if I am a few years late.

Solution 4:

You will want to use interfaces. Generally, multiple inheritance is bad because of the Diamond Problem:

abstract class A {
 abstract string foo();
}

class B extends A {
 string foo () { return "bar"; }
}

class C extends A  {
 string foo() {return "baz"; }
}

class D extends B, C {
 string foo() { return super.foo(); } //What do I do? Which method should I call?
}

C++ and others have a couple ways to solve this, eg

string foo() { return B::foo(); }

but Java only uses interfaces.

The Java Trails have a great introduction on interfaces: http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/concepts/interface.html You'll probably want to follow that before diving into the nuances in the Android API.

Solution 5:

Yea, as everyone else wrote, you cannot do multiple inheritance in Java. If you have two classes from which you'd like to use code, you'd typically just subclass one (say class A). For class B, you abstract the important methods of it to an interface BInterface (ugly name, but you get the idea), then say Main extends A implements BInterface. Inside, you can instantiate an object of class B and implement all methods of BInterface by calling the corresponding functions of B.

This changes the "is-a" relationship to a "has-a" relationship as your Main now is an A, but has a B. Depending on your use case, you might even make that change explicit by removing the BInterface from your A class and instead provide a method to access your B object directly.