Getting syntax error in Java code: Cannot cast from Object to int

Question

I keep getting the syntactic error in Java code:

 Cannot cast from Object to int.

The problem code is like this:

int a = (int)obj;//obj is of Object type

But I have always been using this trick around, and only get the error recently.

My question:

1. Is this a real syntactic error?
2. Is there any configuration that can hide such syntactic error?.

Answer 1

Object to int is two steps - first you need to convert the Object to an Integer, then you need to convert the Integer to an int.

Fortunately auto-boxing will handle the second conversion for you, but you still need to explicitly make the first conversion:

 int a = (Integer)obj;