Jun 01, 2006 : Java "copy constructor"

Well, of course you can just Foo myFoo = (Foo) theirFoo.clone(); to copy an object.

But I want to create an ExtendedFoo out of a Foo. I can't cast the foo (or cloned foo) into an ExtendedFoo because it's not one. I need to create a new ExtendedFoo and copy all of the important stuff from the "foo" object into the "extendedFoo" object. Here's how I did it:

import org.apache.commons.beanutils.BeanUtils;

public class ExtendedFoo extends Foo {

	public ExtendedFoo(Foo source) throws IllegalAccessException, InvocationTargetException {
		BeanUtils.copyProperties(this, source);
	}
	...
}

Isn't that easy?