What is the difference between up-casting and down-casting with respect to class variable

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Upcasting is casting to a supertype, while downcasting is casting to a subtype. Upcasting is always allowed, but downcasting involves a type check and can throw a ClassCastException.

In your case, a cast from a Dog to an Animal is an upcast, because a Dog is-a Animal. In general, you can upcast whenever there is an is-a relationship between two classes.

Downcasting would be something like this:

Animal animal = new Dog();
Dog castedDog = (Dog) animal;

Basically what you’re doing is telling the compiler that you know what the runtime type of the object really is. The compiler will allow the conversion, but will still insert a runtime sanity check to make sure that the conversion makes sense. In this case, the cast is possible because at runtime animal is actually a Dog even though the static type of animal is Animal.

However, if you were to do this:

Animal animal = new Animal();
Dog notADog = (Dog) animal;

You’d get a ClassCastException. The reason why is because animal‘s runtime type is Animal, and so when you tell the runtime to perform the cast it sees that animal isn’t really a Dog and so throws a ClassCastException.

To call a superclass’s method you can do super.method() or by performing the upcast.

To call a subclass’s method you have to do a downcast. As shown above, you normally risk a ClassCastException by doing this; however, you can use the instanceof operator to check the runtime type of the object before performing the cast, which allows you to prevent ClassCastExceptions:

Animal animal = getAnimal(); // Maybe a Dog? Maybe a Cat? Maybe an Animal?
if (animal instanceof Dog) {
    // Guaranteed to succeed, barring classloader shenanigans
    Dog castedDog = (Dog) animal;
}

Downcasts can be expressed more succinctly starting from Java 16, which introduced pattern matching for instanceof:

Animal animal = getAnimal(); // Maybe a Dog? Maybe a Cat? Maybe an Animal?
if (animal instanceof Dog castedDog) {
    // now castedDog is available here as in the example above
}

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