Using generics causes unchecked conversion warning

Question

I have the following code

String innerText = null;
innerText = this.getException(detail.getChildElements());

causing this warning

Type safety: The expression of type Iterator needs unchecked conversion to conform to Iterator

The referenced method is

private String getException(Iterator<OMElementImpl> iterator) { ... }

The other method, getChildElements(), is in a JAR file that I can't touch. There are no other warnings or errors.

From Googling, it seems like the usual way to get rid of this sort of warning is

@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
String innerText = this.getException(detail.getChildElements());

because the compiler can't guarantee safety ahead of time, but I'd prefer to avoid using SuppressWarnings if possible... is there a better way?

EDIT: getChildElements() is documented here

Answer 1

As an alternative you can explicitly cast the argument to the desired type, but SupressWarnings in that case is OK to my view.

String innerText = null;
innerText = this.getException((Iterator<OMElementImpl>)(detail.getChildElements()));

EDIT: As the comments to my answer point out the above do not solve the issue. I wrote as my first intuition, but that was wrong.