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Message:

Problems with Static references

Posted by Tim on February 22, 2002 at 11:01 AM

Sorry about the previous post, I accidently hit "post" half way through...

I'm trying to implement a class that uses a static method to return an instance of itself to the calling object. It's not precisely a singleton because it can also be instantiated via a call to a constructor.

I've gotten it to work more or less correctly, but I'm having trouble with methods in the instance that access non-static variables:

The pertinent code follows:

public class GeneManager {

private GeneManagerGUI gui;

private static GeneManager manager;
private static boolean initialized = false;

public GeneManager() {
this.manager = this;
initialized = true;
}

public void setGUI(GeneManagerGUI gui) {
this.gui = gui;
manager.setGUI(gui);
}

public static GeneManager getGeneManager() {
if (!initialized) {
manager = new GeneManager();
initialized = true;
}
return manager;
}

What I'm doing is the following:

From an object that doesn't have a reference to the GeneManager, I call getGeneManager to get reference to the one instance of the GeneManager. Later on, I use that instance to create a GeneMangerGUI display of the Manager (represented by the non-static variable gui above), which calls setGUI in the manager, giving GeneManager a reference to the Gui that displays its information.

However, when I call any methods in the GeneManager that reference the instance of gui, I get a NullPointerException.

For example:

A call to...

public void newGroup(String sourceName) {
setName(sourceName);
gui.selectNewEntry(sourceName);
}

throws a NullPointerException when gui.selectNewEntry is called.

I would really appreciate any help that anyone can give. I'm a bit unfamiliar with static methods and variables, and hope someone can give me a hand.

Thanks,

Tim

• StackOverflowError exception??? ping203 February 22, 2002 at 11:46 AM (0)