Problem creating a vector of a user defined type

[riesa_susan]

Hi,
I'm having some trouble creating a vector of a user defined type. Here's my user defined type:

public class User {

// variables that define a user
protected String userType;
protected String userLogin;
protected String userPassword;

// constructor
public User(String type, String login, String password)
{
userType = type;
userLogin = login;
userPassword = password;
}

// get the userLogin
public String getLogin()
{
return userLogin;
}

} // end class User

Fairly simple. Now I'm using this class to create users of different types for a program. When they login to the program. It asserts that their login and password are alid and depending on their type displays different options. My problem is extracting an element from the vector and getting to its variables. The following is excerps from my file where I try to check the login field.

Here's how I declared everything:
private User user1, user2, user3;
private Vector dummy;

user1 = new User("supervisor", "Carla", "Hopkins");
user2 = new User("child", "Riesa", "de Beer");
user3 = new User("child", "Lucas", "Cockerham");

dummy = new Vector(3);
dummy.addElement(user1);
dummy.addElement(user2);
dummy.addElement(user3);

I have created a class to handle a button event that will
check to see if the login entered matches a login in the vector of Users

String loginKey = loginText.getText();
// determine if dummy vector contains the login
int size = dummy.size();
User loginCheck;
for(int i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
loginCheck = dummy.get(i);
if (loginCheck.getLogin() == loginKey)
statusText.setText("Login valid: " + loginKey);
else
statusText.setText("Login not valid: " + loginKey);
}

I keep getting the following error:
incompatible types
found: java.lang.Object
required: User
loginCheck = dummy.get(i);

What am I doing wrong? Thanks for your time and input.
Riesa

[ptmcg]

Riesa -

Vector.get() returns Object. Now you and I know that all you put into that Vector were Users, but the get() method only returns Object. For your assignment to work, you will need to cast the result as follows:

loginCheck = (User)dummy.get(i);

You might also want to look at the proposed addition to Java to support "generics" (similar in concept to templates in C++, but without the code bloat baggage) that would allow you to define a Vector containing objects of a particular type, and would allow you to get() those objects out without casting them (and would also verify that addElement args were of the proper type, too).

-- Paul