I made use of an Annotation for the first time today, and it was a very pleasant experience!
I have a number of classes which all extend the same abstract class. These classes have a number of public getter methods, and some of the getter methods are used to retrieve values which I want to display in a GUI. The problem was how I should distinguish between these and the other getter methods.
First I thought I'd use reflection, but then I'd have to name my printable getters in a similar way, which didn't feel right.
So I thought I would check out that new thing called annotations, and it fit the bill perfectly! I could even add a field to deal with the order they should be sorted.
I started by creating my annotation like this:
package example;
import java.lang.annotation.ElementType;
import java.lang.annotation.Retention;
import java.lang.annotation.RetentionPolicy;
import java.lang.annotation.Target;
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Target(ElementType.METHOD)
public @interface Printable {
String displayName() default "";
int sortOrder() default 0; // sort the items in ascending order
}
Now I can annotate all methods in my sub-class which I want print:
public class SubClass extends AbstractClass {
@Printable(displayName = "Execute command", sortOrder = 1)
public String getCmd() {
return this.cmd;
}
}
And finally I can the the following code snippet to print subClass.
Note that I've skipped the sorting.
public void classPrinter(AbstractClass c) {
for (Method m:c.getClass().getMethods()) {
if (m.isAnnotationPresent(Printable.class)) {
Printable p = m.getAnnotation(Printable.class);
String displayName = p.displayName();
System.out.println("displayName = " + displayName);
int i = p.sortOrder();
System.out.println("sortOrder = " + i);
String result = m.invoke(c, (Object[]) null); // get value
System.err.println("result = " + result);
}
}
}
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