Is it possible to overload abstract methods in an abstract Java class, but implement only one of the overloaded methods in subclass?

Question

I have an abstract class (showing only the relevant parts) with two overloaded methods.

abstract public class Component {
    ...
    abstract protected void createPhysics();
    abstract protected void createPhysics(Comp1D[] comp1DS);
    ...
}

In the subclasses which extend this abstract class I only want to use either the one with arguments or the one without, but never both of them. For example

public class Comp1D extends Component{
    ...
    protected void createPhysics(Comp1D[] comp1Ds){
        ...
    }
}

and

public class Comp3D extends Component{
    ...
    protected void createPhysics(){
        ...
    }
}

Of course this won't compile this way since the other createPhysics method is not implemented in the subclass. My quick and dirty solution would be to implement both methods in subclasses, but the unused method would have empty body.

Is there a more elegant way to solve it in Java 8?

Answer 1

With abstract methods, there is not. And on a syntactical level, it would not be sound either. If one has a Component, one can call both methods. How should one know which one is implemented and which one is not?

One could define both method in the abstract class and let them throw, for example, an UnsupportedOperationException, thus forcing sublcasses to override (at least one of) those methods if they wish to not throw such an exception. This, however, seems like a workaround for another problem.

I would suggest re-evaluating the overall architecture of that section and find another solution to the problem. For example, maybe two separated classes and handler for those classes would yield a cleaner architecture.