Can I have different copies of a static variable for each different type of inheriting class

Question

I want to have the same static variable with a different value depending on the type of class.

So I would have

public class Entity
{
     public stat         


        

Answer 1

A quick test will show you that, yes, you can override static variables in subclasses.

I have put together a simple inheritance structure to test this. StaticTest is the super of StaticTestSub. They both declare static ints TEST1, TEST2, and TEST3 with varying degrees of access. To simplify the example, I left out the private version.

public class StaticTest {
    public static int TEST1 = 1;
    protected static int TEST2 = 1;
    static int TEST3 = 1;

    public static void main(String[] args) {
            System.out.println("StaticTest.TEST1: " + StaticTest.TEST1);
            System.out.println("StaticTest.TEST2: " + StaticTest.TEST2);
            System.out.println("StaticTest.TEST3: " + StaticTest.TEST3);
            System.out.println("StaticTestSub.TEST1: " + StaticTestSub.TEST1);
            System.out.println("StaticTestSub.TEST2: " + StaticTestSub.TEST2);
            System.out.println("StaticTestSub.TEST3: " + StaticTestSub.TEST3);
    }
}


public class StaticTestSub extends StaticTest {
    public static int TEST1 = 2;
    protected static int TEST2 = 2;
    static int TEST3 = 2;
}

You can try this at home. The out put was:

StaticTest.TEST1: 1
StaticTest.TEST2: 1
StaticTest.TEST3: 1
StaticTestSub.TEST1: 2
StaticTestSub.TEST2: 2
StaticTestSub.TEST3: 2

For your specific needs, however, I recommend the approach taken by Laurence Gonsalves