Item 38: Emulate extensible enums with interfaces

In almost all respects, enum types are superior to the typesafe enum pattern.
 In other words, using the pattern, it was possible to have one enumerated type extend another; using the language feature, it is not. This is no accident. For the most part, extensibility of enums turns out to be a bad idea. It is confusing that elements of an extension type are instances of the base type and not vice versa. 

That said, there is at least one compelling use case for extensible enumerated types, which is operation codes, also known as opcodes. An opcode is an enumerated type whose elements represent operations on some machine, such as the Operation type in Item 34, which represents the functions on a simple calculator. Sometimes it is desirable to let the users of an API provide their own operations, effectively extending the set of operations provided by the API.

Luckily, there is a nice way to achieve this effect using enum types. The basic idea is to take advantage of the fact that enum types can implement arbitrary interfaces by defining an interface for the opcode type and an enum that is the standard implementation of the interface. For example, here is an extensible version of the Operation type from Item 34:

// Emulated extensible enum using an interface

public interface Operation {
    double apply(double x, double y);
}

public enum BasicOperation implements Operation {
    PLUS("+") {
        public double apply(double x, double y) { return x + y; }
    },
    MINUS("-") {
        public double apply(double x, double y) { return x - y; }
    },
    TIMES("*") {
        public double apply(double x, double y) { return x * y; }
    },
    DIVIDE("/") {
        public double apply(double x, double y) { return x / y; }
    };
    private final String symbol;

    BasicOperation(String symbol) {
        this.symbol = symbol;
    }

    @Override public String toString() {
        return symbol;
    }
}

While the enum type (BasicOperation) is not extensible, the interface type (Operation) is, and it is the interface type that is used to represent operations in APIs. You can define another enum type that implements this interface and use instances of this new type in place of the base type. 

// Emulated extension enum
public enum ExtendedOperation implements Operation {
    EXP("^") {
        public double apply(double x, double y) {
            return Math.pow(x, y);
        }
    },
    REMAINDER("%") {
        public double apply(double x, double y) {
            return x % y;
        }
    };

    private final String symbol;

    ExtendedOperation(String symbol) {
        this.symbol = symbol;
    }

@Override public String toString() {
        return symbol;
    }
}

public static void main(String[] args) {
    double x = Double.parseDouble(args[0]);
    double y = Double.parseDouble(args[1]);
    test(ExtendedOperation.class, x, y);
}

private static <T extends Enum<T> & Operation> void test(
        Class<T> opEnumType, double x, double y) {
    for (Operation op : opEnumType.getEnumConstants())
        System.out.printf("%f %s %f = %f%n",
                          x, op, y, op.apply(x, y));
}

A second alternative is to pass a Collection<? extends Operation>, which is a bounded wildcard type (Item 31), instead of passing a class object:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    double x = Double.parseDouble(args[0]);
    double y = Double.parseDouble(args[1]);
    test(Arrays.asList(ExtendedOperation.values()), x, y);
}

private static void test(Collection<? extends Operation> opSet,
        double x, double y) {
    for (Operation op : opSet)
        System.out.printf("%f %s %f = %f%n",
                          x, op, y, op.apply(x, y));
}

The resulting code is a bit less complex, and the test method is a bit more flexible: it allows the caller to combine operations from multiple implementation types. On the other hand, you forgo the ability to use EnumSet (Item 36) and EnumMap (Item 37) on the specified operations.

A minor disadvantage of the use of interfaces to emulate extensible enums is that implementations cannot be inherited from one enum type to another. If the implementation code does not rely on any state, it can be placed in the interface, using default implementations (Item 20). In the case of our Operation example, the logic to store and retrieve the symbol associated with an operation must be duplicated in BasicOperation and ExtendedOperation. In this case it doesn’t matter because very little code is duplicated. If there were a larger amount of shared functionality, you could encapsulate it in a helper class or a static helper method to eliminate the code duplication.

The pattern described in this item is used in the Java libraries. For example, thejava.nio.file.LinkOption enum type implements the CopyOption and OpenOption interfaces.

In summary, while you cannot write an extensible enum type, you can emulate it by writing an interface to accompany a basic enum type that implements the interface. This allows clients to write their own enums (or other types) that implement the interface. Instances of these types can then be used wherever instances of the basic enum type can be used, assuming APIs are written in terms of the interface.