FindClass from any thread in Android JNI

Question

Android\'s JNI tips page mentions this FAQ: Why didn\'t FindClass find my class? They mention multiple solutions and the last option there is this one:

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Answer 1

After much trying and crashing of my app, a colleague and I managed to cache and succesfully use the class loader in another, native, thread. The code we used is shown below (C++11, but easily converted to C++2003), posted here since we couldn't find any examples of the aforementioned "Cache a reference to the ClassLoader object somewhere handy, and issue loadClass calls directly. This requires some effort.". Calling findClass worked perfectly when called from a thread different from the one of JNI_OnLoad. I hope this helps.

JavaVM* gJvm = nullptr;
static jobject gClassLoader;
static jmethodID gFindClassMethod;

JNIEXPORT jint JNICALL JNI_OnLoad(JavaVM *pjvm, void *reserved) {
    gJvm = pjvm;  // cache the JavaVM pointer
    auto env = getEnv();
    //replace with one of your classes in the line below
    auto randomClass = env->FindClass("com/example/RandomClass");
    jclass classClass = env->GetObjectClass(randomClass);
    auto classLoaderClass = env->FindClass("java/lang/ClassLoader");
    auto getClassLoaderMethod = env->GetMethodID(classClass, "getClassLoader",
                                             "()Ljava/lang/ClassLoader;");
    gClassLoader = env->CallObjectMethod(randomClass, getClassLoaderMethod);
    gFindClassMethod = env->GetMethodID(classLoaderClass, "findClass",
                                    "(Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/Class;");

    return JNI_VERSION_1_6;
}

jclass findClass(const char* name) {
    return static_cast<jclass>(getEnv()->CallObjectMethod(gClassLoader, gFindClassMethod, getEnv()->NewStringUTF(name)));
}

JNIEnv* getEnv() {
    JNIEnv *env;
    int status = gJvm->GetEnv((void**)&env, JNI_VERSION_1_6);
    if(status < 0) {    
        status = gJvm->AttachCurrentThread(&env, NULL);
        if(status < 0) {        
            return nullptr;
        }
    }
    return env;
}

Answer 2

Try attaching your native thread to the JVM first.

The pointer to jvm you can obtain first thing in JNI_OnLoad

env->GetJavaVM(&jvm);

Then from your native thread

JNIEnv *env;
jvm->AttachCurrentThread((void **)&env, NULL);

Then use that env for FindClass