Finding annotations from subclass or child class

[Eric Juneau]

Hi, this question has probably been answered somewhere, but I wasn't able to come up with good search terms for it. Basically, I am trying to get the annotations for fields in a subclass in the parent class. Example:

public class ParentClass {

    public void validate() throws Exception {
        Field[] fields = this.getClass().getDeclaredFields();

        for(Field field : fields){
            field.setAccessible(true); // for convenience
        
            if(field.isAnnotationPresent(MyAnnotation.class)){
                ...
            }
        }
    ...
}
...
public class ChildClass extends ParentClass{

    @MyAnnotation
    private RequesterIdentity requesterIdentity;

    ...
}
...
//somewhere in Main
ChildClass foo = new ChildClass();
foo.validate();

The problem is that there are no annotations present for the fields in the superclass's validate. I know that child classes won't inherit annotations of the parent class. But shouldn't it work the other way around?

[Rob Spoor]

What's the definition of @MyAnnotation? More specifically, what are its meta annotations (@Documented, @Inherited, @Retention, @Target, etc)?

[Eric Juneau]

MyAnnotation is defined as such:

@Target(value = {ElementType.FIELD, ElementType.LOCAL_VARIABLE})
@Inherited
public @interface MyAnnotation {
    boolean canBeEmpty() default false;
    String[] relatedFields() default {};
}

[Rob Spoor]

Check out the possible values of RetentionPolicy, and figure out which one you need to use with the @Retention meta annotation.

[Eric Juneau]

I added

@Retention(value=RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)

to my annotation and that worked. Thanks.

[Rob Spoor]

You're welcome