JAVA - How to get annotations from Annotation?

Question

I want to get annotations from annotation, but the weird thing is I can't get single annotation from annotation instance. How do I solve this? I want to get annotations from this annotation instance.

public static void test(Annotation annotation) {
    System.out.println("ValidBoolean annotation len:" + ValidBoolean.class.getAnnotations().length);
    System.out.println(annotation.getClass().getName() + ":" + annotation.getClass().getAnnotations().length);
    if (annotation instanceof ValidBoolean) {
        ValidBoolean validBoolean = (ValidBoolean) annotation;
        System.out.println("[BOOLEAN]" + validBoolean.getClass().getName() + ":" + validBoolean.getClass().getAnnotations().length);
    }
}

print result is:

ValidBoolean annotation len:3
com.sun.proxy.$Proxy28:0
[BOOLEAN]com.sun.proxy.$Proxy28:0

acdcjunior · Accepted Answer · 2020-05-07 23:15:25Z

8

If I understand you correctly, you want to do:

Annotation[] annotationAnnotations = annotation.annotationType().getAnnotations();

Generally, annotationType() works such that

someClass.getAnnotation(someAnnotationClass).annotationType() == someAnnotationClass

So annotation instanceof ValidBoolean also implies annotation.annotationType() == ValidBoolean.class, thus invoking .getAnnotations() on them will lead to the same annotations.

edited May 7, 2020 at 23:15

acdcjunior

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answered Jan 27, 2016 at 20:06

Holger

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Comments

Rafael Teles · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-22 04:11:31Z

0

It looks like annotation is a proxy object

 validBoolean.getClass().getSuperclass().getAnnotations().length

answered Jan 22, 2016 at 4:11

Rafael Teles

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2 Comments

Kim Over a year ago

Still not working. Do you know how to get annotation from proxy? I'm not familiar with this.

Kim Over a year ago

I'm still not really understanding this Proxy mechanism. But I can get Annotation real class by annotation.annotationType() rather than annotation.getClass(), because annotation is just a interface so annotation.getClass() will only produce a Java Proxy object!

Ievgen Degtiarenko · Accepted Answer · 2018-10-09 12:47:40Z

0

I believe you can do

TopLevelAnnotation topLevelAnnotation = anything.get.getAnnotation(TopLevelAnnotation.class);
NestedAnnotation nestedAnnotation = topLevelAnnotation.annotationType().getAnnotation(NestedAnnotation.class);

Please check

/**
 * Returns the annotation type of this annotation.
 * @return the annotation type of this annotation
 */
java.lang.annotation.Annotation#annotationType()

in java.lang.annotation.Annotation

answered Oct 9, 2018 at 12:47

Ievgen Degtiarenko

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