Scanning Java annotations at runtime

How do I search the whole classpath for an annotated class?

I'm doing a library and I want to allow the users to annotate their classes, so when the Web application starts I need to scan the whole classpath for certain annotation.

I'm thinking about something like the new functionality for Java EE 5 Web Services or EJB's. You annotate your class with @WebService or @EJB and the system finds these classes while loading so they are accessible remotely.

Use org.springframework.context.annotation.ClassPathScanningCandidateComponentProvider

API

> A component provider that scans the classpath from a base package. It then applies exclude and include filters to the resulting classes to find candidates.

ClassPathScanningCandidateComponentProvider scanner =
new ClassPathScanningCandidateComponentProvider(<DO_YOU_WANT_TO_USE_DEFALT_FILTER>);

scanner.addIncludeFilter(new AnnotationTypeFilter(<TYPE_YOUR_ANNOTATION_HERE>.class));

for (BeanDefinition bd : scanner.findCandidateComponents(<TYPE_YOUR_BASE_PACKAGE_HERE>))
    System.out.println(bd.getBeanClassName());

And another solution is ronmamo's Reflections.

Quick review:

• Spring solution is the way to go if you're using Spring. Otherwise it's a big dependency.
• Using ASM directly is a bit cumbersome.
• Using Java Assist directly is clunky too.
• Annovention is super lightweight and convenient. No maven integration yet.
• Reflections indexes everything and then is super fast.

You can find classes with any given annotation with ClassGraph, as well as searching for other criteria of interest, e.g. classes that implement a given interface. (Disclaimer, I am the author of ClassGraph.) ClassGraph can build an abstract representation of the entire class graph (all classes, annotations, methods, method parameters, and fields) in memory, for all classes on the classpath, or for classes in whitelisted packages, and you can query that class graph however you want. ClassGraph supports more classpath specification mechanisms and classloaders than any other scanner, and also works seamlessly with the new JPMS module system, so if you base your code on ClassGraph, your code will be maximally portable. See the API here.

If you want a really light weight (no dependencies, simple API, 15 kb jar file) and very fast solution, take a look at annotation-detector found at https://github.com/rmuller/infomas-asl

Disclaimer: I am the author.

You can use Java Pluggable Annotation Processing API to write annotation processor which will be executed during the compilation process and will collect all annotated classes and build the index file for runtime use.

This is the fastest way possible to do annotated class discovery because you don't need to scan your classpath at runtime, which is usually very slow operation. Also this approach works with any classloader and not only with URLClassLoaders usually supported by runtime scanners.

The above mechanism is already implemented in ClassIndex library.

To use it annotate your custom annotation with @IndexAnnotated meta-annotation. This will create at compile time an index file: META-INF/annotations/com/test/YourCustomAnnotation listing all annotated classes. You can acccess the index at runtime by executing:

ClassIndex.getAnnotated(com.test.YourCustomAnnotation.class)

There's a wonderful comment by zapp that sinks in all those answers:

new Reflections("my.package").getTypesAnnotatedWith(MyAnnotation.class)

Spring has something called a AnnotatedTypeScanner class.
This class internally uses

ClassPathScanningCandidateComponentProvider

This class has the code for actual scanning of the classpath resources. It does this by using the class metadata available at runtime.

One can simply extend this class or use the same class for scanning. Below is the constructor definition.

/**
	 * Creates a new {@link AnnotatedTypeScanner} for the given annotation types.
	 * 
	 * @param considerInterfaces whether to consider interfaces as well.
	 * @param annotationTypes the annotations to scan for.
	 */
	public AnnotatedTypeScanner(boolean considerInterfaces, Class<? extends Annotation>... annotationTypes) {

		this.annotationTypess = Arrays.asList(annotationTypes);
		this.considerInterfaces = considerInterfaces;
	}

Is it too late to answer. I would say, its better to go by Libraries like [ClassPathScanningCandidateComponentProvider][1] or like [Scannotations][2]

But even after somebody wants to try some hands on it with classLoader, I have written some on my own to print the annotations from classes in a package:

public class ElementScanner {

public void scanElements(){
	try {
	//Get the package name from configuration file
	String packageName = readConfig();
	
	//Load the classLoader which loads this class.
	ClassLoader classLoader = getClass().getClassLoader();
	
	//Change the package structure to directory structure
	String packagePath  = packageName.replace('.', '/');
	URL urls = classLoader.getResource(packagePath);
	
	//Get all the class files in the specified URL Path.
	File folder = new File(urls.getPath());
	File[] classes = folder.listFiles();
	
	int size = classes.length;
	List<Class<?>> classList = new ArrayList<Class<?>>();
	
	for(int i=0;i<size;i++){
		int index = classes[i].getName().indexOf(".");
		String className = classes[i].getName().substring(0, index);
		String classNamePath = packageName+"."+className;
		Class<?> repoClass;
		repoClass = Class.forName(classNamePath);
		Annotation[] annotations = repoClass.getAnnotations();
		for(int j =0;j<annotations.length;j++){
			System.out.println("Annotation in class "+repoClass.getName()+ " is "+annotations[j].annotationType().getName());
		}
		classList.add(repoClass);
	}
	} catch (ClassNotFoundException e) {
		e.printStackTrace();
	}
}

/**
 * Unmarshall the configuration file
 * @return
 */
public String readConfig(){
	try{
		URL url = getClass().getClassLoader().getResource("WEB-INF/config.xml");
		JAXBContext jContext = JAXBContext.newInstance(RepositoryConfig.class);
		 Unmarshaller um =  jContext.createUnmarshaller();
		 RepositoryConfig rc = (RepositoryConfig) um.unmarshal(new File(url.getFile()));
		 return rc.getRepository().getPackageName();
		}catch(Exception e){
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
	return null;
	
}
}

And in config File, you put the package name and unmarshall it to a class . [1]: https://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/2.5.x/javadoc-api/org/springframework/context/annotation/ClassPathScanningCandidateComponentProvider.html [2]: http://scannotation.sourceforge.net/

The Classloader API doesn't have an "enumerate" method, because class loading is an "on-demand" activity -- you usually have thousands of classes in your classpath, only a fraction of which will ever be needed (the rt.jar alone is 48MB nowadays!).

So, even if you could enumerate all classes, this would be very time- and memory-consuming.

The simple approach is to list the concerned classes in a setup file (xml or whatever suits your fancy); if you want to do this automatically, restrict yourself to one JAR or one class directory.

With Spring you can also just write the following using AnnotationUtils class. i.e.:

Class<?> clazz = AnnotationUtils.findAnnotationDeclaringClass(Target.class, null);

For more details and all different methods check official docs: https://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/current/javadoc-api/org/springframework/core/annotation/AnnotationUtils.html

Google Reflection if you want to discover interfaces as well.

Spring ClassPathScanningCandidateComponentProvider is not discovering interfaces.

Google Reflections seems to be much faster than Spring. Found this feature request that adresses this difference: http://www.opensaga.org/jira/browse/OS-738

This is a reason to use Reflections as startup time of my application is really important during development. Reflections seems also to be very easy to use for my use case (find all implementers of an interface).

If you're looking for an alternative to reflections I'd like to recommend Panda Utilities - AnnotationsScanner. It's a Guava-free (Guava has ~3MB, Panda Utilities has ~200kb) scanner based on the reflections library source code.

It's also dedicated for future-based searches. If you'd like to scan multiple times included sources or even provide an API, which allows someone scanning current classpath, AnnotationsScannerProcess caches all fetched ClassFiles, so it's really fast.

Simple example of AnnotationsScanner usage:

AnnotationsScanner scanner = AnnotationsScanner.createScanner()
        .includeSources(ExampleApplication.class)
        .build();

AnnotationsScannerProcess process = scanner.createWorker()
        .addDefaultProjectFilters("net.dzikoysk")
        .fetch();

Set<Class<?>> classes = process.createSelector()
        .selectTypesAnnotatedWith(AnnotationTest.class);