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

Warning suppression is not a solution. You should not be doing two level casting in one statement.

HashMap getItems(javax.servlet.http.HttpSession session) {

    // first, cast the returned Object to generic HashMap
    HashMap theHash = (HashMap)session.getAttribute("attributeKey");

    // next, cast every entry of the HashMap to the required type 
    HashMap returingHash = new HashMap<>();
    for (Entry entry : theHash.entrySet()) {
        returingHash.put((String) entry.getKey(), (String) entry.getValue());
    }
    return returingHash;
}