Constructors and inheritance in Groovy

Question

I am new to Groovy and I am having a little problem with constructors of subclasses. Basically, I have a base abstract class like

class BaseClass {
  def BaseClass(Map options) {
    // Does something with options,
    // mainly initialization.
  }
  // More methods
}

and a bunch of derived classes like

class AnotherClass extends BaseClass {
  // Does stuff
}

I would like to be able to create instances like

def someObject = new AnotherClass(foo: 1, bar: 2)

Unfortunately, Groovy creates automatically all sorts of constructors for AnotherClass, with various signatures - based on the properties of AnotherClass - but will not allow me to just reuse the constructor in BaseClass. I have to manually create one like

class AnotherClass extends BaseClass {
  def AnotherClass(options) {
    super(options)
  }
  // Does stuff
}

It feels repetitive doing so for each subclass, and it is probably the wrong way.

What would be the Groovy way to share some logic in the constructor?

Answer 1

@InheritConstructors is probably what you are looking for:

@InheritConstructors
class AnotherClass extends BaseClass {}

will create the constructors corresponding to the superclass constructors for you.