Creating Generics Classes

Often the classes we create deal with specific types; for example, a Book may have title of type String and a list of Authors, a Publisher, and so on. Sometimes though, especially when working with collections, we may not want to tie the members of a class to specific types. For example, a list of Books vs. a list of Authors are both lists. The list should be general enough to support members of either of those types, or other types, but specific enough to disallow, for example, adding an Author to a list of Books. Generics classes are used to create such generalized lists with type safety. Kotlin support for generics is much like the support in Java in many ways, but variance and constraints are declared differently; we discussed these in the context of generic functions in Generics: Variance and Constraints of Parametric Types.

Generic classes

We frequently use generic classes, but, as application programmers, we tend not to create these types of classes as often as we create nongeneric classes. Still, it’s useful to learn how to create a generic class. We’ll achieve that goal with an example.

Kotlin has a class named Pair that holds two objects of two different types. We’ll create here a PriorityPair that will hold a pair of objects of the same type, but based on ordering, with the larger object first and the smaller one second. We’ll use a compareTo() method, of the Comparable<T> interface, to determine the objects’ ordering.

Before we jump into code, let’s think through the features of the class we’re about to create. Once we create an instance, there’s no need to modify the members that are part of the PriorityPair, thus there’s no need for any mutable operations. Since the objects will be ordered, the parametric class needs to be constrained to implement the Comparable<T> interface. The class permits only read and not write, so we may be tempted to mark the parametric type with the out annotation, like the way class Pair<out A, out B> is defined in Kotlin. But since the properties of our class will be passed to the compareTo() method of Comparable<T>, we can’t annotate with the out keyword. That’s enough thinking—let’s jump into the code now.

Here’s the PriorityPair class with parametrized type T constrained to implement Comparable<T>: