inheritance - Which Overloaded Method is Called in Java

Question

I have a basic inheritance situation with an overloaded method in the super class.

public class Person {
    private String name;
    private int dob;
    private String gender;

    public Person(String theName, int birth, String sex){
        name = theName;
        dob = birth;
        gender = sex;
    }

    public void work(){
        getWorkDetail(this);
    }

    public void getWorkDetail(Employee e){
        System.out.println("This person is an Employee");
    }

    public void getWorkDetail(Person p){
        System.out.println("This person is not an Employee");
    }
}

The following Employee class extends the Person class above:

public class Employee extends Person {

    String department;
    double salary;

    public Employee(String theName, int birth, String sex){
        super(theName, birth, sex);
        department = "Not assigned";
        salary = 30000;
    }
}

The main method simply creates an Employee object (both static and dynamic type) and calls .work() on it:

public static void main(String[] args){
    Employee e1 = new Employee("Manager1", 1976, "Female");
    e1.work();
}

This ends up printing

This person is not an Employee

Looking through this I had thought that since both the static and dynamic type of the object e1 is Employee it would call the overloaded method in Person that takes an Employee as a parameter. Since I am clearly wrong about this I opened a debugger assuming the reference to "this" at the line getWorkDetail(this) in the Person class must have morphed to it's super class. However this is not what I found.

Clearly at this point in the code this is an Employee object, however it still chose to execute the overloaded method getWorkDetail(Person p). Can anyone explain this behavior?

Answer 1

Unlike method overrides, method overloads are linked based on the static type. And in this case, getWorkDetail(this) in Person only knows about the Person type.

Method overloading is not designed to provide dynamic runtime behavior.

To take advantage of dynamic binding, you may need to redesign your code to override the methods, instead:

public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
    new Employee("Manager1", 1976, "Female").getWorkDetail();
    new Person("Manager1", 1976, "Female").getWorkDetail();
}

And modify behavior based on implementing classes. Of course, you can overload methods, as long as you take care of overriding the overloaded methods too, if required.

class Person {
    private String name;
    private int dob;
    private String gender;

    public Person(String theName, int birth, String sex) {
        name = theName;
        dob = birth;
        gender = sex;
    }

    public void getWorkDetail() {
        System.out.println("This person is not an Employee");
    }
}

class Employee extends Person {

    String department;
    double salary;

    public Employee(String theName, int birth, String sex) {
        super(theName, birth, sex);
        department = "Not assigned";
        salary = 30000;
    }

    public void getWorkDetail() {
        System.out.println("This person is an Employee");
    }
}