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Java

Posted by Yevhenii Zhdan
Yevhenii Zhdan
1,155 Points

How to call a same method with different amount of parameters?

I can't call addItem method because in first time it is name and quantity and in second name only. I can't understand how to call the same method with different amount of parameters...

Michael Makali'i Fernandez
Michael Makali'i Fernandez
8,090 Points

I think what you want is to overload your methods. You need to have two methods with the same signature but different parameters.

Ex:

public int dice(int sides){
    Random r = new Random();
    return r.nextInt(sides) + 1; // +1 as nextInt range begins at 0
}

public int dice(int sides, int modifier){
    Random r = new Random();
    return r.nextInt(sides) + 1 + modifier;
}

So you would call this method as

dice(4); // returns a number between 1-4
dice(4, 3) // returns a number between 4-7

1 Answer

Ken Alger
STAFF
Ken Alger
Treehouse Teacher
Ken Alger
Ken Alger
Treehouse Teacher

Yevhenii;

What you seem to be referring to is known as method overloading. Let's create a quick example and then discuss it.

public void overloadingExample(String str) {
    System.out.println(str);
} 

public void overloadingExample(String str, int num) {
    System.out.println(str + " " + num);
}

Hopefully what those two methods do makes some sense. As you can see, the method overloadingExample() is overloaded based on the data type of arguments. What does that mean in terms of usage? Well, it allows us to call that method with either of the following examples and Java will not throw an error:

overloadingExample("example");

overloadingExample("another example", 2);

As one might expect, we would get the following data returned:

example

another example 2

Does that help at all? Java is pretty great at figuring out what to do with a method name based on the parameter you pass into the function, as long as you pass in the proper data types.

Post back if you have further questions.

Ken