Question

is it expensive to always pass Activity as an argument to a method?

You see, I have this class (this is where I put the commonly used methods by my activities). And all my methods there have Activity as a parameter, because the results of those methods will need to be send back to the activity that invoked the method, so basically I need to know to whom should I throw back the results, so I always have like:

public static void processThis(Activity activity){ 
// some Code
}

I just like to know if this is against the best practices or if this is expensive to use?

Thanks. Looking forward for your explanations that will enlighten me.

Added:
I’m extracting commonly used methods from my activities to promote code reuse. Like, ActivityA use methodA and send broadcast back to ActivityA, same way goes for ActivityB which uses methodB(same as methodA) and send broadcast back to ActivityB. So what I want to achieve is to to extract that methodA and methodB which basically are the same, and put them into another class, and add a parameter Activity so I can know to whom do I need to send the broadcast back. Thanks.

Answer 1

In Java, all parameters that are not primitives are implicit pointers; consequently, passing an object such as activity only requires passing around the address at which the Activity is located in memory, so passing such a thing is not an expensive thing to do in Java.

So, the real question you should ask yourself is not whether it is expensive, but rather if it makes the most sense (from a logical / maintainability perspective). If it makes sense, then by all means do it.