Accessing type annotations at runtime (original) (raw)

Gunnar Morling gunnar at hibernate.org
Thu Mar 13 13:24:53 UTC 2014

Hi,

Is it possible to retrieve type annotations (as defined by JSR 308) using reflection at runtime? E.g. I would like to retrieve the @NotNull annotation from a member declared like this:

private List<@NotNull String> names;

I assumed that this would be possible using reflection, but I couldn't find a way to do it. Is there an example for this somewhere? Or are type annotations only meant to be accessed by compile-time tools such as the Checker framework?

I noticed that the byte code of my class contains information about the annotation, so I guess one could access it by examining the class file if it's really not possible via the reflection API.

Many thanks,

--Gunnar

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