how to create object of a class whose name is contained in a string

[Rajiv Chelsea]

Hi
lets suppose

String className = com.rajiv.SomeClass

How can i make an object of SomeClass?

[Matthew Brown]

Check out the methods of the java.lang.Class class. (In particular, you want to look at forName() and newInstance()). That should give you what you want.

[Wouter Oet]

Since this is the beginning Java section I want to ask you this: why do you want this? Because reflection (which you're going to use with the Class methods) is not a beginning Java topic and you lose a lot of advantages that you have with regular Java.

[Rajiv Chelsea]

I can do the following

Class.forName(className).newInstance();

but the above line of code returns an object
How do i recast it to SomeClass which is the original class name.

[Paul Beckett]

You may need to think a little bit about what you are asking. If you are reading a class name from a String and you don't know what the class is until runtime then what are you going to cast it to?

However if you have a class hierarchy such as:

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

and you *always* read the subclass of Shape then you can cast to the Shape superclass. If you can complete all the logic you need via a variable of type Shape then fine. If not you may need to use a conditional block that checks which subtype of Shape your instanceof is and then casts to the appropriate subtype.