Constructors and inheritance in Groovy

Question

I am new to Groovy and I am having a little problem with constructors of subclasses. Basically, I have a base abstract class like

class BaseClass {
 def BaseClass(Map options) {
 // Does something with options,
 // mainly initialization.
 }
 // More methods
}

and a bunch of derived classes like

class AnotherClass extends BaseClass {
 // Does stuff
}

I would like to be able to create instances like

def someObject = new AnotherClass(foo: 1, bar: 2)

Unfortunately, Groovy creates automatically all sorts of constructors for AnotherClass, with various signatures - based on the properties of AnotherClass - but will not allow me to just reuse the constructor in BaseClass. I have to manually create one like

class AnotherClass extends BaseClass {
 def AnotherClass(options) {
 super(options)
 }
 // Does stuff
}

It feels repetitive doing so for each subclass, and it is probably the wrong way.

What would be the Groovy way to share some logic in the constructor?

Answer 1

@InheritConstructors is probably what you are looking for:

@InheritConstructors
class AnotherClass extends BaseClass {}

will create the constructors corresponding to the superclass constructors for you.

• Andrea: Thank you very much, this is exactly what I was looking for! By the way, for possible future readers, InheritConstructors lives in the package groovy.transform.