Implementing a method that is also overriden

Question

I am adding spring-security into my app and came across an issue. My implementation of UserDetails implements org.springframework.security.core.userdetails.UserDetails but also extends my User entity class. Both of these have a getPassword() method, the spring security interface's method returns a String and mine returns a byte array since the password is encrypted.

I want my implementation to implement the interface's method and not override my entity class' method but Netbeans keeps giving an error that the return type is invalid. I would like to avoid renaming my getPassword() method to work around this problem.

Is there a way of telling the compiler to implement the interface's method instead of overriding the superclass?

Thanks

Answer 1

Return type is not taken into consideration when overloading, so essentially you can't really do that. I would simply rename my implementation.

Answer 2

You can't do it, the return type can't be the only difference between two otherwise identical Java method signatures.

The easiest way to fix it is to declare User as a field instead of extending it:

public class MyUserDetails implements UserDetails {

  private final User user;

}