Is passing 'this' in a method call accepted practice in java

Question

Is it good/bad/acceptable practice to pass the current object in a method call. As in:

public class Bar{

    public Bar(){}



    public void foo(Baz baz){

        //  modify some values of baz

    }

}



public class Baz{

    //constructor omitted



    public void method(){

        Bar bar = new Bar();

        bar.foo(this);

    }

}

Specifically, is the line

bar.foo(this)

acceptable?

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Answer 1

There's no reason not to use it, this is the current instance and it's perfectly legitimate to use. In fact there's often no clean way to omit it.

So use it.

As it's hard to convince it's acceptable without example (a negative answer to such a question is always easier to argument), I just opened one of the most common java.lang classes, the String one, and of course I found instances of this use, for example

1084        // Argument is a String
1085        if (cs.equals(this))
1086            return true;

Look for "(this" in big "accepted" projects, you won't fail to find it.

Is passing 'this' in a method call accepted practice in java

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