Inner class access to its creator

Question

Hi there,
From a subclass of Action I have created as a (non-static) inner class of a JFrame, I wish to reference the parent JFrame in a JFileChooser invocation, so something like:JFileChooser.showSaveDialog(**this**);with **this** being the parent JFrame.
One option I can think of is to pass through "this" when I instantiate the action, but I wondered if there was a language construction that provided this information directly.
I tried a search through the forums using "parent of an inner class" but found nothing useful. Is there a mechanism to provide this, or is passing "this" through to the inner class the only option?
Thanks for any help you can provide.
Tim

Answer 1

To access wrapper instance of inner class, you can use WRAPPER_INSTANCE_CLASS.this keyword.
For example:
public class a {
   int value = 0;
   public void doSomething() {
      Object dummy = new Object() {
          public String toString() {
              a.this.setSomething(10);
              return a.this.toString();
      System.out.println(dummy);
   public void setSomething(int x) {
      value = x;
   public String toString() {
      return "class a, the value now is " + value;
   public static void main (String s[]) {
       new a().doSomething();
}note that I use a.this.setSomething(10);
a is the wrapper class, so a.this refers to the wrapper instance, not current instance.
rgds,
Alex