Extracting data elements from a user-defined class stored in an ArrayList

I have successfully created and exercised a user-defined class “Person” with 9 private data fields and 18 public methods (9 gets and 9 puts). I now want to store multi-occurrences of this class in an ArrayList. The ArraryList is defined as:

ArrayList <Person> personArrayList = new ArrayList<Person>();

I have successfully loaded the instantiation of the class into the ArrayList with the following statement:

personArrayList.add(newPerson);

Using the NetBeans debugger I was able to confirm that the data does exist in ArrayList element zero (0). However, when I try to extract a data element from the class with a the following statement:

System.out.println (personArrayList.get(0).getFirstName());

I get the “cannot find symbol” error during compile.

The following statement:

System.out.println ("Value for personArrayList.get(0) = " + personArrayList.get(0));

Returns “Value for personArrayList.get(0) = datainputdemo.Person@25d06e”

The datainputdemo is the class where the ArrayList is declared and initialized.

When working directly with the class data structure the following statement works fine:

System.out.println (newPerson.getFirstName());

I am trying to point to an existing element in the ArrayList and use a method in that object to extract and print the contents of a specific data field. I am using Java 1.5.

Thanks in advance.

Joe Broghamer