What is the need to Override Hashcode() and equals() method

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Although there are lots of materials are available on internet and API document about the necessity of the overriding the hashcode() and equals() method in Java but lots of new developers still not able to understand the necessity of hashcode() method.
In this article, I will try to explain step by step the need of overriding hashcode() method in Java.

Few Thump rules:

• If two objects are same then they must return same value in hashcode() and equals() method whenever invoked.
• It is not necessary that two different object must have different hashcode values. it might be possible that they share common hash bucket.

JVM assigns unique hashcode value to each object when they are created in memory and if developers don’t override the hashcode method then there is no way the two object returns same hashcode value.

As the question comes in your mind that equals() method is used to compare objects that they are having same value or not but why should we override the hashcode method ?

The answer to the question is for the hash technique based data structures like HashMap and HashTable.

How Hashcode works in java

As you can see in above diagram that every object is placed in Hash bucket depending on the hashcode they have. It is not necessary that every different object must have different hashcode. hashcode is used to narrow the search result. When we try to insert any key in HashMap first it checks whether any other object present with same hashcode and if yes then it checks for the equals() method. If two objects are same then HashMap will not add that key instead it will replace the old value by new one.

What will happen if I don’t override the hashcode method?
Ans : If the object does not implement hashcode() method and used as key then we will not get the object back as shown in below code.