Thanks for confirming. Indeed a solution could finally take advantage of all of them. But I am not sure if the effort is worth it. Moreover for the SOURCE retention, even if JDK offers support for retrieving that info it would mean that you should have access at runtime to your sources (exactly the way QDox is working).I've been taking a look at the RetentionPolicy stuff... you are right, there are three scenarios:
1. You may use RetentionPolicy.SOURCE. This is similar to using a javadoc tag, and it seems Sun itself provides some API methods to access this information the same way you access javadoc tags 2. If you use RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME you are able to access the annotation data with the reflection API (again, new methods, classes and interfaces added to handle them) 3. RetentionPolicy.CLASS stores the annotation data in the bytecode but doesn't make it available in runtime using reflection. In this case you still can access the data accesing the bytecode of the class, and I think there are some open source bytecode manipulation projects that already support this. This is the default RetentionPolicy if none specified.
So if you want to use annotation data as a source to XDoclet, I think you could use either the second or third way. You could even support the three ways, based on the availability of source code of libraries you may be working with.
Best regards Jose
Most probably the best solution would be to define and use only annotations with RUNTIME retention policy.
:the_mindstorm
On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 01:14:26 +0200, pope <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:The things here are not so easy. Actually the annotation retention policy (the way the compiler discards/preserves) annotation info is an enum with SOURCE, CLASS and RUNTIME. For the 1st case the annotation info is lost after a compilation. I know that for the RUNTIME this info can be retrieved at runtime using reflection, and unfortunately I am not sure what is happening with the 2nd type (it exists in the bytecode, but I think that reflection is not able to access it).
:the_mindstorm
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