@MustOverride annotation?

Question

In .NET, one can specify a \"mustoverride\" attribute to a method in a particular superclass to ensure that subclasses override that particular method. I was wondering whether

Answer 1

Ignoring abstract methods, there is no such facility in Java. Perhaps its possible to create a compile-time annotation to force that behaviour (and I'm not convinced it is) but that's it.

The real kicker is "override a method in a superclass that itself has some logic that must be run through". If you override a method, the superclass's method won't be called unless you explicitly call it.

In these sort of situations I've tended to do something like:

abstract public class Worker implements Runnable {
  @Override
  public final void run() {
    beforeWork();
    doWork();
    afterWork();
  }

  protected void beforeWork() { }
  protected void afterWork() { }
  abstract protected void doWork();
}

to force a particular logic structure over an interface's method. You could use this, for example, to count invocations without having to worry about whether the user calls super.run(), etc.