HidingField
Hiding fields of superclasses may cause confusion and errors

Alternate names: hiding, OvershadowingSubclassFields

The problem

If a class has a field of the same name as any field visible to it on any of its superclasses or superinterfaces, the subclass’ field is said to “hide” the superclass’ field.

When this circumstance occurs, users of the class declaring the hiding field can’t interact with the fields from the superclass.

Let’s take a look at how field hiding might cause problems:

class Super {
  public String foo = "bar";
}

class Sub extends Super {
  private int foo = 0; // the same name, so this hides `Super`'s `foo`
}

class Main {
  void stringFn(String s) { /*...*/ }
  public static void main(String... args) {
    // Looking at the API of `Super`, I should be able to access a string `foo`
    // on any object of type `Super` or its subclasses, right?
    stringFn(new Sub().foo); // Oops! `foo` is not visible, and the wrong type!
  }
}

Suppression

Suppress false positives by adding the suppression annotation @SuppressWarnings("HidingField") to the enclosing element.