JavaTM 2 Platform
Standard Ed. 5.0

java.lang
Interface Cloneable

All Known Subinterfaces:
AclEntry, Attribute, AttributedCharacterIterator, Attributes, CertPathBuilderResult, CertPathParameters, CertPathValidatorResult, CertSelector, CertStoreParameters, CharacterIterator, CRLSelector, Descriptor, GSSCredential, Name

public interface Cloneable

A class implements the Cloneable interface to indicate to the Object.clone() method that it is legal for that method to make a field-for-field copy of instances of that class.

Invoking Object's clone method on an instance that does not implement the Cloneable interface results in the exception CloneNotSupportedException being thrown.

By convention, classes that implement this interface should override Object.clone (which is protected) with a public method. See Object.clone() for details on overriding this method.

Note that this interface does not contain the clone method. Therefore, it is not possible to clone an object merely by virtue of the fact that it implements this interface. Even if the clone method is invoked reflectively, there is no guarantee that it will succeed.

Since:
JDK1.0
See Also:
CloneNotSupportedException, Object.clone()


JavaTM 2 Platform
Standard Ed. 5.0

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For further API reference and developer documentation, see Java 2 SDK SE Developer Documentation. That documentation contains more detailed, developer-targeted descriptions, with conceptual overviews, definitions of terms, workarounds, and working code examples.

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