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

I may have misunderstood the question(an example and a couple of surrounding lines would be nice), but why don't you always use an appropriate interface (and Java5+)? I see no reason why you would ever want to cast to a HashMap instead of a Map. In fact, I can't imagine any reason to set the type of a variable to HashMap instead of Map.

And why is the source an Object? Is it a parameter type of a legacy collection? If so, use generics and specify the type you want.