New syntax in Java 6?

[Tejas Jain]

I saw someone did something like:

User user = new User(); //User is a Java Bean

user.setName("John Smith").setPhone("800-123-4567").print(); // This is a new syntax to me. From which version does it start? I did not see this in Java 5

[James Sabre]

That is not a Java version thing. It seems that the writer of the class User defined methods along the lines of

class User
{
    String name;
...

   public User setName(String name)
   {
       this.name = name;
       return this;
    }

}

I use this approach sometimes but never for Java beans. Usually only when I want to set a property of an agent type class.

[Bear Bibeault]

I've often wished that the JavaBean specification included this feature for setters so that one can chain them as such, but as James pointed out, this is not a valid bean construct. In fact, defining setters to return anything other than void will break lots of things that expect JavaBeans.

[Rob Spoor]

Tejas Jain wrote:I saw someone did something like:

User user = new User(); //User is a Java Bean

user.setName("John Smith").setPhone("800-123-4567").print(); // This is a new syntax to me. From which version does it start? I did not see this in Java 5

Check out StringBuffer, available since Java 1.0, which uses the same technique. As Bear said, this is called chaining. It's the same as the following, provided setName and setPhone return a reference to the current object ("this"):

user.setName("John  Smith");
user.setPhone("800-123-4567");
user.print();

[Bear Bibeault]

And just to emphasize: this is nothing new in Java 6, or any other version of Java. It's simply a matter of defining methods to allow this.