Another powerful feature of writing our own classes is the ability to have code automatically execute anytime a new object is created based on the class. This is done through a special method called a “constructor”. Let’s see how we can do that in Java.
First, we’ll update the class UML diagram to include a couple of constructors. Constructors typically look like methods, but they have a couple of special features. First, the name of the constructor methods is the same as the name of the class. Also, those methods don’t specify a return type, since the constructor itself doesn’t actually return a value.
In code, we can create a constructor by declaring a special method that uses the name of the class as the method name. We also don’t include a return type as part of the method declaration, through we can use keywords such as private and public as we’ll see later in this chapter.
Inside of the parentheses, we can accept parameters as part of our constructor. However, since this constructor doesn’t accept any parameters, we’ll leave that blank.
There we go! This is what is called a “default constructor” for the class. It doesn’t accept any parameters, and it doesn’t do anything either. Java actually adds this to our class by default if we don’t include a constructor, just so we can always instantiate our classes.
However, a blank constructor is really pretty useless. So, let’s add some code to it. For example, if we look at our class, we see that each attribute is given a default value. Instead of doing it where the attribute is declared, we can move those default values into the default constructor, like this.
Once we do, we can remove the default values from the attribute declarations. This makes our code a bit clearer and easier to follow.
Back in the Main class, when we use the new keyword followed by the name of the class and a set of parentheses, we are actually calling the class’s constructor method. So, this is what actually executes the code we’ve defined in the constructor. Pretty handy!
We can also create a constructor that accepts parameters. It works exactly the same as any other class method declaration. Inside of the constructor, we still must use the this keyword to reference class attributes. So, this new constructor will accept parameters giving values for each attribute, and instead of setting the attributes to a set of default values, it can fill them in with the desired values given as arguments.
So, if we want to use that constructor, we can simply use the new keyword, followed by the name of the class, and then include arguments for each parameter inside of the parentheses. We can even overload the constructor with multiple sets of parameters, just like we learned how to do with other functions in an earlier module.
As we can see in the comments after each line that prints output, we get the values we expect out of each attribute of the class, whether we’ve instantiated it using the default constructor or our own constructor that accepts default values. See if you can add the constructors needed in the Teachers class.