2014-04-09 21:01 GMT+02:00 Emmanuel Bernard <emmanuel(a)hibernate.org&gt;: I always thought that type annotations would allow us to look via refection to annotations like public class Foo { public Set< @NotNull String> names; } But looking at some tutorials like http://jaxenter.com/jsr-308-explained-java-type-annotations-49929.html it seems that these annotations are only "visible" to a compiler plug-in / processor. Am I right? No, one can access type annotations at runtime (at least for fields, method signatures and so on) via reflection. A while ago I feared the same, so I asked on core-libs-dev [1] and got confirmation that it's possible. That's how you'd do it: // given private List<@NotNull String> names; Field namesField = ...; // List<String> AnnotatedParameterizedType type = (AnnotatedParameterizedType) namesField.getAnnotatedType(); // String AnnotatedType typeArg = type.getAnnotatedActualTypeArguments()[0]; // @NotNull Annotation annotation = typeArg.getAnnotations()[0]; It's one of the planned tasks of the HV GSoC project to make use of this to support constraints as in your example. If that turns out true that would suck as it would only be useful to static tools. I wish I had checked the spec earlier to influence it :( Emmanuel --Gunnar [1] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/core-libs-dev/2014-March/025732.html _______________________________________________ hibernate-dev mailing list hibernate-dev(a)lists.jboss.org https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/hibernate-dev