inner anonymous class return object

[Edward Chen]

Collection outerC;
getPersistenceBrokerTemplate().execute
(new PersistenceBrokerCallback() {
public Object doInPersistenceBroker(PersistenceBroker pb) 
throws PersistenceBrokerException {

Collection students = DBFunctions.loadData(pb,productId,null,null);

return factors;
}
});

In above coding, how could return oject to the outer class ? for example, "outerC" should be get the collection "students" .

Thanks.

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

You can assign directly to the variable "outerC" if it's a member variable of the enclosing instance. If it's a local variable, then you need to do a trick of some kind, because inner classes can only access final local variables. One thing you could do would be to initialize outerC like this:\

final Collection outerC = new ArrayList();

and then in the inner class, say

Collection students = DBFunctions.loadData(pb,productId,null,null);
outerC.addAll(students);

[Ilja Preuss]

Originally posted by Ernest Friedman-Hill:
You can assign directly to the variable "outerC" if it's a member variable of the enclosing instance. If it's a local variable, then you need to do a trick of some kind, because inner classes can only access final local variables. One thing you could do would be to initialize outerC like this:\

final Collection outerC = new ArrayList();

and then in the inner class, say

Collection students = DBFunctions.loadData(pb,productId,null,null);
outerC.addAll(students);

In my humble opinion, such a solution is a dirty hack. I'd first like to know more about *why* you want to "return" the value, to evaluate better alternatives...