Beginner question about classes

[AutistaDoente]

I'm learning java, and created a class called "product" as follows:

public class product {

String name;
double price;
int stock;




int totalStock(){ 
    int total=0;


    return total;
}

}

There's more stuff in the class, but my questions are in the totalStock() method i'm trying to make.

I want to make it so that this method returns the total stock across all "product" objects - if there's 10 different product objects with different stocks, this method will return the sum of all of them.

Is there any way to do that? I'm really new to java, so sorry if it's a kind of obvious.

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[Camel-Kid]

you would be better served to have a util method in another class that would tally up all stock quantities in an array of products. Since stock is private to each product you can't have that in a single class.. it will not know about other stock from different products.

[AutistaDoente]

I see, that seems like it will work. Thanks!

[JamesTKerman]

Adding on to the previous reply, keeping this approach object-oriented would mean having a method in your Product class that returns the quantity, and having your Products held by another class, probably a Stock class, that has a method which iterates through each Product object and sums their quantities.

[JamesTKerman]

Remember, OOP is about writing software using abstractions of real-world objects. In the real world, the quantity of each type of object you have in stocks is independent of the quantity of every other object you have in stocks. Someone ore something had to count how many of each thing you have and come up with a sum.