[hibernate-dev] Java 8, type annotations and Hibernate Validator

[Gunnar Morling]

2014-04-09 21:01 GMT+02:00 Emmanuel Bernard <emmanuel at hibernate.org>:

> 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 at lists.jboss.org
> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/hibernate-dev
>