Thread: Static Methods Preventing Usage of Instances?

Hello,

Copeg's post towards this thread:

This fully depends upon how one wishes to use the method (unclear - at least to me - at this point) Declaring the method as static precludes one from using any sort of object oriented programming, thus the method cannot access instance fields of the object if it needs to.

I created two short classes to sort of find out what this meant, but I feel I do not understand it well enough.

Test class (main):

package votek;
 
public class Test {
 
	public static void main(String[] args) {
		SomeMethod();
	}
 
	public static void SomeMethod() {
		Character character = new Character();
		character.totalLevel = 50;
 
		System.out.println(character.totalLevel);
	}
 
}

Character class:

package votek;
 
public class Character {
	private int level = 0;
 
	public Character() {
		level = 50;
	}
 
}

OR

Does it mean that making a static method in the class with private instances will prevent the method from using the private instances?

And to extend off of Greg's code and the situation as I understood it in the linked post 1) suppose another class wishes to call 'someMethod', but you don't have a reference to a Character object (or don't know how to). 2) You choose to make someMethod static so you can just access it by calling Character.someMethod(). 3) A compile time error will result because 'level' is not static. 4) You can choose to make level static, but now its value will be the same for each object that is an instance of Character. 5) An alternative when given the situation in (1), is to somehow pass the reference of the object to the other class so that it can call the method.

Tested the error and understand what you meant now.

Great!

Is this the way that is supposed to be done?

Yes...if that's the behavior you want. Sorry for the vague answer, but answers to questions like this are very often context based (the context being what one wishes the program to do). While there are best practices there often is not really a 'supposed to' unless the code doesn't compile, throws Exceptions at runtime, or misbehaves.