Annotated class with reflection

[Jacob Sonia]

I have a use case wherein i have multiple classes and i am trying to annotate all of those classes. I am trying to build a map of all the annotated fields of all the classes at startup with the actual field names so that when a user gives me annotated field name i can map it to actual field names.
So my first start was to create my own annotation class and annotate all the fields of the classes with it providing a name. But how do i build a map and find out all the classes that are annotated with my annotation.

[Stephan van Hulst]

First of all, your annotation needs a retention policy "runtime". Then, you can scan the classpath for all classes containing certain annotations. There are libraries out there that do it, just google for classpath scanning and annotations.