is there some lightweight tecnique for adding type safety to identifier properties?

Posted by shoren on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by shoren
Published on 2010-05-24T09:33:46Z Indexed on 2010/05/24 10:51 UTC
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After using C++ I got used to the concept of Identifier which can be used with a class for the type, provides type safety and has no runtime overhead (the actual size is the size of the primitive). I want to do something like that, so I will not make mistakes like:

personDao.find(book.getId());//I want compilation to fail  
personDao.find(book.getOwnerId());//I want compilation to succeed

Possible solutuions that I don't like:

  1. For every entity have an entity id class wrapping the id primitive. I don't like the code bloat.
  2. Create a generic Identifier class. Code like this will not compile:

    void foo(Identifier book);
    void foo(Identifier person);

Does anyone know of a better way?
Is there a library with a utility such as this?
Is implementing this an overkill?
And the best of all, can this be done in Java without the object overhead like in C++?

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