How do I address unchecked cast warnings?

Question

Eclipse is giving me a warning of the following form:

Type safety: Unchecked cast from Object to HashMap

This is from a call to

Answer 1

You can create a utility class like the following, and use it to suppress the unchecked warning.

public class Objects {

    /**
     * Helps to avoid using {@code @SuppressWarnings({"unchecked"})} when casting to a generic type.
     */
    @SuppressWarnings({"unchecked"})
    public static  T uncheckedCast(Object obj) {
        return (T) obj;
    }
}

You can use it as follows:

import static Objects.uncheckedCast;
...

HashMap getItems(javax.servlet.http.HttpSession session) {
      return uncheckedCast(session.getAttribute("attributeKey"));
}

Some more discussion about this is here: http://cleveralias.blogs.com/thought_spearmints/2006/01/suppresswarning.html