Is it bad practice to make a setter return “this”?

Question

Is it a good or bad idea to make setters in java return \"this\"?

public Employee setName(String name){
   this.name = name;
   return this;
}

Answer 1

I have been making my setters for quite a while and the only real issue is with libraries that stick with the strict getPropertyDescriptors to get the bean reader/writer bean accessors. In those cases, your java "bean" will not have the writters that you would expect.

For example, I have not tested it for sure, but I would not be surprised that Jackson won't recognizes those as setters when creating you java objects from json/maps. I hope I am wrong on this one (I will test it soon).

In fact, I am developing a lightweight SQL centric ORM and I have to add some code beyong getPropertyDescriptors to recognized setters that returns this.