How do I reimplement valueof on enumeration

Question

I need to re-implement the enum.valueof method of a few of my enumerations so they no longer throw exceptions, instead they simply return null if a value doesn't exist in the enumeration.

I'm trying the basic

@Override
    public static <T extends Enum<T>> T valueOf(Class<T> enumType,
            String name){

but it's not working, saying I need to override or implement a super type.

I can come up with a super class I guess, but I'm just not sure how to put this together. Any ideas?

Answer 1

You can't. You'll have to define another, different method. The valueOf method is automatically generated by the compiler.

public static MyEnum permissiveValueOf(String name) {
    for (MyEnum e : values()) {
        if (e.name().equals(name)) {
            return e;
        }
    }
    return null;
}