Casting generics

[Christophe Verré]

A little doubt about generics.

I have a class containing a Map of String to Object.
One of the record in the map is of type List<MyRecords>;

Object mylist = myMap.get("myrecord");

This will do, but what I want to do is :

List<MyRecords> mylist = (List<MyRecords> myMap.get("myrecord");

The compiler keeps on complaining about that cast.
It's only a warning that I can suppress, but I was wondering if I'm missing something here.
My map does not contain only lists, it contains any kind of stuff.

[Garrett Rowe]

My map does not contain only lists, it contains any kind of stuff.

The consequence of this of course is that the compiler can't be *sure* that the Object that you obtain from the Map is a List. Therefore the cast to a List<MyRecords> is an unchecked cast and the compiler must warn you about it. The only way to eliminate the warning is to make the Map typesafe by specifying at compile time (using generics) that all the keys are Strings, and all the values are List<MyRecord>. Since apparently you can't do that, you'll have to live with, or supress, the warning.

[Christophe Verré]

Thank you for the very clear explanation