Casting Player to another class

For a "Secret" project that I am working on, I need to cast Player onto another class, where I have created a few extra methods to make my life easier. I know that Spout does something similar to this, but I don't know how it works or how I could do it. Is there anyone that could explain this to me?

Sorry if this is not all that clear. It's hard (at least for me) to be clear with what I want if I don't understand large parts of it.

 

//first class
public static Player player = something
//2nd class
Player player = firstclass.player

?

 

That's not what I mean... I want to cast Player onto (for example) EPlayer, and have EPlayer inherit all of the methods, etc. from Player while gaining the new methods specified in EPlayer. That way I could use EPlayer.getDisplayName(); and also EPlayer.insertNewMethodHere();

 

I think you just write something like:
SpecialPlayer extends Player

and then you just cast it
SpecialPlayer splr=(SpecialPlayer) player;

 

EPlayer Eplayer = (Player) sender; or sumething?

 

Here's what my two relevant headers look like:

Code:java

public abstract interface bPlayer extends Player {
//contains abstract methods
}
 
//In a separate class file
public class bConPlayer extends CraftPlayer implements bPlayer {
//Contains actual abstract method code from bPlayer
}

Every time I try to cast Player to bPlayer, I get a ClassCastException, and I'm not sure how to fix it.

 

try:

Code:

bPlayer extends [SIZE=12px][FONT=Bitstream Vera Sans Mono][COLOR=rgb(0, 0, 0)]org[B].[/B][COLOR=rgb(0, 128, 128)]bukkit[/COLOR][B].[/B][COLOR=rgb(0, 128, 128)]entity[/COLOR][B].[/B][COLOR=rgb(0, 128, 128)]Player[/COLOR][/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]

That's what Spout does!

 

Maybe @Afforess will help me with this... He's on the Spout team, so maybe he could shed some light on how I can do this.

Edit: In all likelihood, I probably need to learn more Java to understand what I need to do here as well...

 

The reason for the ClassCastException is because the Player object you receive from CraftBukkit is still a CraftPlayer. It doesn't implement bPlayer.

The way to fix this is to create a wrapper class around Player. This wrapper should accept a Player object in its constructor and then delegate all the normal Player method calls to that object.

Then you can add your custom bPlayer methods to this wrapper.

Anytime you encounter a Player from CraftBukkit (e.g. Server.getPlayer(), or event.getPlayer()), you wrap it with your wrapper class and then pass that wrapped object on to your methods.

 

I can tell you how, but I recommend you don't. The problem is that only one plugin can extend and replace players w/o problems. If two plugins do it, they will break each other.

If you really do want to know, we extend craftplayer and replace the contents of the bukkitentity field for entity players.

I suggest using a wrapper, like others have suggested instead though.

 

Thanks for the suggestions, and I've decided to go with the wrapper. And that really is a long list of methods that are in Player

 

Yeah, about that... is there any reason bPlayer must extend Player? Wrappers are fragile and are definitely a pain to write/maintain.

Would be nice if Bukkit itself had some sort of abstract "PlayerWrapper" class to make this process easier and shield plugin developers from changes to the Player interface...

Anyway, proxying would also save work delegating all those Player methods, plus shield you from future changes. Might be worth a look.

 

No, it did not need to extend Player, and actually, upon further investigation I created a proxy class instead of a wrapper. And it did indeed make it a lot easier to delegate all of the methods, even though there are so many. Thanks for all of the help, it made my life a lot easier