Programming Tutorials

cloneable in Java

By: Saravanan in Java Tutorials on 2010-01-01  

In this tutorial we are going to see use of cloneable interface and how to use it. The cloneable interface defines no members. It is used to indicate that a class allows a bitwise copy of an object to be made. If you try to call clone() on a class that does not implement Cloneable, a CloneNotSupportedException is thrown. When a clone is made the constructor for the object being cloned is not called. A clone is a copy of the original.

class Customer implements Cloneable 
{
  String name;
  int income;
  public Customer(String name, int income) 
  {
    this.name = name;
    this.income = income;
  }

  public Customer() 
  {
  }

  public String getName() 
  {
    return name;
  }

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

  public void setIncome(int income) 
  {
    this.income = income;
  }

  public int getIncome() 
  {
    return this.income;
  }

  public Object clone() throws CloneNotSupportedException 
  {
    try 
    {
      return super.clone();
    } 
    catch (CloneNotSupportedException cnse) 
    {
      System.out.println("CloneNotSupportedException thrown " + cnse);
      throw new CloneNotSupportedException();
    }
  }
}

public class MainClass 
 {
  public static void main(String[] args) 
  {
    try 
   {
      Customer c= new Customer("Angel", 9000);
      System.out.println(c);
      System.out.println("The Customer name is " + c.getName());
      System.out.println("The Customer pay is " + c.getIncome());

      Customer cClone = (Customer) c.clone();
      System.out.println(cClone);
      System.out.println("The clone's name is " + cClone.getName());
      System.out.println("The clones's pay is " + cClone.getIncome());

    } 
   catch (CloneNotSupportedException cnse) 
   {
      System.out.println("Clone not supported");
    }
  }
}