Question

Consider the following Java class:

public class Foo
{
    public static void doStuff()
    {
        // boring stuff here
    }
}

Is it possible to access either the class literal Foo.class, or just the class name "Foo" from within a static method such as doStuff()? In a non-static method I would just call this.getClass(), but there is no this to use in a static method.

---

Edit: sorry this wasn’t clear – I want to do this with explicitly using the class literal Foo.class.

Answer 1

Unfortunately Java doesn’t give you a good way to do this. You just have to reference Foo.class. This is something that is a regular annoyance for me.

For logging I solved it (the idea for the solution came from Log5j) by reading the stack, because it got really annoying to restate the class for every logger every time. Fortunately modern IDEs make it relatively painless, so that refactoring isn’t really negatively impacted if you have to change the name of the class.

EDIT: Some code:

private static StackTraceElement getCallerStackTraceElement(StackTraceElement[] elements) {
    for (int i = 0; i < elements.length; i++) {
        if (elements[i].getClassName().equals(MyLogger.class.getName())) {
            return elements[i + 1];
        }
    }
    return null;
}

MyLogger in this case is the class where this method exists. It finds itself in the stacktrace and goes one earlier, and then extracts the class from the StackTraceElement.

The StackTraceElement[] array can be retrieved by either new Exception().getStackTrace(), or Thread.currentThread().getStackTrace(); The way this method is written it assumes the stacktrace is created on the first method call into MyLogger.