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Return of 'this'

Reports methods returning this.

While such a return is valid, it is rarely necessary, and usually indicates that the method is intended to be used as part of a chain of similar method calls (for example, buffer.append("foo").append("bar").append("baz")). Such chains are frowned upon by many coding standards.

Example:

public Builder append(String str) { // [...] return this; }

Inspection Details

Available in:

IntelliJ IDEA 2023.3, Qodana for JVM 2023.3

Plugin:

Java, 233.SNAPSHOT

Last modified: 13 July 2023