Question

Following this tutorial:

http://developer.android.com/training/notepad/notepad-ex2.html

In Step 2, this method gets called:

registerForContextMenu(getListView());

which is a public method of Activity. Now, I’m a bit of a Java newbie here – I thought if you wanted to call an instance method of a superclass you needed to preface it with this. E.g.

this.registerForContextMenu(getListView());

Is it just a style thing here? Is there any difference between

this.registerForContextMenu 

and simply

registerForContextMenu

Answer 1

No, there is no difference.

You don’t have to use this., but it is often done anyway to make the code clearer.

For one thing, it makes it easy to tell if a method is static or not if you use the convention of calling instance methods like this:

this.registerForContextMenu() 

and static methods like this:

ClassName.staticRegisterForContextMenu()