How to determine the calling class in Java
I once tried a dirty hack that involved parsing the stack trace of an exception instance, but this would return the calling class name much efficiently:
The
If you are bothered by the prospect of using a sun.* API, you may (write a utility class to) sub-class the SecurityManager and use its
String callingClassName =
sun.reflect.Reflection.getCallerClass(2).getName();
The
getCallerClass method takes an int argument where a value of 0 (zero) returns sun.reflect.Reflection, 1 returns the class of the currently executing method and every increment looks up the call stack.
If you are bothered by the prospect of using a sun.* API, you may (write a utility class to) sub-class the SecurityManager and use its
protected native Class[] getClassContext() method which returns the call stack. The element at index 0 is the class of the currently executing method, the element at 1 is the caller and so on up the stack.
4 Comments:
Alternatively, on JDK 1.4+ you could just say "new Thread().getStackTrace()[1].getClassName()".
By
Anonymous, at October 3, 2004 at 2:06 PM
I'd check that getStackTrace actually returns an array with some elements, or you could end up throwing ArrayOutOfBoundsException unexpectedly.
-- Tom Hawtin
By
Anonymous, at October 3, 2004 at 11:53 PM
Here's the best way to do it:
Throwable stack = new Throwable();
stack.fillInStackTrace();
stack.getStackTrace(1).getClassName();
You can also get calling method, line #, etc. Much more reliable.
By
Anonymous, at September 7, 2005 at 12:29 PM
What if the calling method is on an abstract class and I want to know the name of the concrete subclass used for the call?
Malcolm
By
Anonymous, at July 16, 2006 at 10:38 PM
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