Question about inner class - help please

Question

hi all
i have a question about the inner class. i need to create some kind of object inside a process class. the reason for the creation of object is because i need to get some values from database and store them in an array:
name, value, indexNum, flag
i need to create an array of objects to hold those values and do some process in the process class. the object is only for the process class that contains it. i am not really certain how to create this inner class. i tried it with the following:
public class process{
class MyObject{}
List l = new ArrayList();
l.add(new MyObject(....));
or should i create the object as static? what is the benifit of creating this way or static way? thanks for you help.

Answer 1

for this case, i do need to create a new instance of
this MyObject each time the process is running with a
new message - xml. but i will be dealing with the case
where i will need a static object to hold some
property values for all the instances. so i suppose i
will be using static inner class for that case.The two situations are not the same. You know the difference between instance variables and static variables, of course (although you make the usual sloppy error and call them static objects). But the meaning of "static" in the definition of an inner class is this: if you don't declare an inner class static, then an instance of that inner class must belong to an instance of its containing class. If you do declare the inner class static, then an instance of the inner class can exist on its own without any corresponding instance of the containing class. Obviously this has nothing to do with the meaning of "static" with respect to variables.