Inheritence issue?

[penagate]

It can't find workOnPart because you've declared the variable as an Employee, which doesn't contain that method. You need to cast it to a FactoryWorker.

((FactoryWorker)myEmployee).workOnPart(...);

But that's not good; a sign of bad design. The usual way is to make methods for dealing with specific employee types and type their arguments using the specific type.

void tellThatGuyToGetOffHisButtAndDoSomeWork(FactoryWorker guy, String whatToDo)
{
  guy.workOnPart(whatToDo);
}

That way, there's no explicit casting involved; you can code the method without worrying about types; and any type checking errors will be reported in a more logical place in your code.

Obviously, that's a contrived example: you hopefully wouldn't need to make a method that only did that.


As a side note, declaring variables without initialising them is generally a bad practice. You should only declare a variable when you can give it a meaningful value. Otherwise, unless you're the most meticulous (and unproductive) coder in the world, you'll run into some sort of error related to an uninitialised variable.