Inheritance Issues with instanceOf not recognised in IF condition

Question

I have an the following inheritance hierarchy: Staff (Abstract), HomeWorker (Abstract), Typist. Typist inherits from both abstract classes.

I am implementing an interface called Manager (for an academic assignment). The class that I am implementing Manager in is called Branch. One of the methods in Branch that I need to implement is setEmail, shown below.

The issue is that only Typists have email addresses, not other Staff (Translators and Clerks). All staff are stored in a TreeMap . I'm trying to check that the staff member specified by the id parameter is an instanceOf Typist, before I try calling the setEmail method (as this method only exists on Typist).

However, using BlueJ, as soon as I type instanceOf in the IF condition, the scope highlighting is telling me it's out of scope and that ')' is required after the staffMember reference.

Any ideas??

/** Sets email for a typist

 * @param id represents the staff id
 * @param email is the email address
 */ 
public void setEmail(String id, String email)
{
    //Should be done in the typist class. This increases coupling though. 
    //Need to see if there is a way that I can do this using the staff class instead 
    Staff staffMember = staff.get (id);
    //TO DO: Need to put an IF statement in that confirms the staff member is a typist,    otherwise I could end up
    //trying to set an email against a staff type which doesn't store email addresses
    if (staffMember instanceOf Typist)
    {
    staffMember.setEmail(email);      
    }

}

Answer 1

Try using the keyword

instanceof

instead of

instanceOf

since this last one is not a keyword in Java.