Interface Processor
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- All Known Implementing Classes:
- AbstractProcessor
public interface Processor
The interface for an annotation processor.Annotation processing happens in a sequence of rounds. On each round, a processor may be asked to process a subset of the annotations found on the source and class files produced by a prior round. The inputs to the first round of processing are the initial inputs to a run of the tool; these initial inputs can be regarded as the output of a virtual zeroth round of processing. If a processor was asked to process on a given round, it will be asked to process on subsequent rounds, including the last round, even if there are no annotations for it to process. The tool infrastructure may also ask a processor to process files generated implicitly by the tool's operation.
Each implementation of a
Processor
must provide a public no-argument constructor to be used by tools to instantiate the processor. The tool infrastructure will interact with classes implementing this interface as follows:- If an existing
Processor
object is not being used, to create an instance of a processor the tool calls the no-arg constructor of the processor class. - Next, the tool calls the
init
method with an appropriateProcessingEnvironment
. - Afterwards, the tool calls
getSupportedAnnotationTypes
,getSupportedOptions
, andgetSupportedSourceVersion
. These methods are only called once per run, not on each round. - As appropriate, the tool calls the
process
method on theProcessor
object; a newProcessor
object is not created for each round.
The tool uses a discovery process to find annotation processors and decide whether or not they should be run. By configuring the tool, the set of potential processors can be controlled. For example, for a
JavaCompiler
the list of candidate processors to run can be set directly or controlled by a search path used for a service-style lookup. Other tool implementations may have different configuration mechanisms, such as command line options; for details, refer to the particular tool's documentation. Which processors the tool asks to run is a function of the types of the annotations present on the root elements, what annotation types a processor supports, and whether or not a processor claims the annotation types it processes. A processor will be asked to process a subset of the annotation types it supports, possibly an empty set. For a given round, the tool computes the set of annotation types that are present on the elements enclosed within the root elements. If there is at least one annotation type present, then as processors claim annotation types, they are removed from the set of unmatched annotation types. When the set is empty or no more processors are available, the round has run to completion. If there are no annotation types present, annotation processing still occurs but only universal processors which support processing all annotation types,"*"
, can claim the (empty) set of annotation types.An annotation type is considered present if there is at least one annotation of that type present on an element enclosed within the root elements of a round. For this purpose, a type parameter is considered to be enclosed by its generic element. Annotations on type uses, as opposed to annotations on elements, are ignored when computing whether or not an annotation type is present.
An annotation is present if it meets the definition of being present given in
AnnotatedConstruct
. In brief, an annotation is considered present for the purposes of discovery if it is directly present or present via inheritance. An annotation is not considered present by virtue of being wrapped by a container annotation. Operationally, this is equivalent to an annotation being present on an element if and only if it would be included in the results ofElements.getAllAnnotationMirrors(Element)
called on that element. Since annotations inside container annotations are not considered present, to properly process repeatable annotation types, processors are advised to include both the repeatable annotation type and its containing annotation type in the set of supported annotation types of a processor.Note that if a processor supports
"*"
and returnstrue
, all annotations are claimed. Therefore, a universal processor being used to, for example, implement additional validity checks should returnfalse
so as to not prevent other such checkers from being able to run.If a processor throws an uncaught exception, the tool may cease other active annotation processors. If a processor raises an error, the current round will run to completion and the subsequent round will indicate an error was raised. Since annotation processors are run in a cooperative environment, a processor should throw an uncaught exception only in situations where no error recovery or reporting is feasible.
The tool environment is not required to support annotation processors that access environmental resources, either per round or cross-round, in a multi-threaded fashion.
If the methods that return configuration information about the annotation processor return
null
, return other invalid input, or throw an exception, the tool infrastructure must treat this as an error condition.To be robust when running in different tool implementations, an annotation processor should have the following properties:
- The result of processing a given input is not a function of the presence or absence of other inputs (orthogonality).
- Processing the same input produces the same output (consistency).
- Processing input A followed by processing input B is equivalent to processing B then A (commutativity)
- Processing an input does not rely on the presence of the output of other annotation processors (independence)
The
Filer
interface discusses restrictions on how processors can operate on files.Note that implementors of this interface may find it convenient to extend
AbstractProcessor
rather than implementing this interface directly.- Since:
- 1.6
-
-
Method Summary
All Methods Instance Methods Abstract Methods Modifier and Type Method and Description Iterable<? extends Completion>
getCompletions(Element element, AnnotationMirror annotation, ExecutableElement member, String userText)
Returns to the tool infrastructure an iterable of suggested completions to an annotation.Set<String>
getSupportedAnnotationTypes()
Returns the names of the annotation types supported by this processor.Set<String>
getSupportedOptions()
Returns the options recognized by this processor.SourceVersion
getSupportedSourceVersion()
Returns the latest source version supported by this annotation processor.void
init(ProcessingEnvironment processingEnv)
Initializes the processor with the processing environment.boolean
process(Set<? extends TypeElement> annotations, RoundEnvironment roundEnv)
Processes a set of annotation types on type elements originating from the prior round and returns whether or not these annotation types are claimed by this processor.
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-
-
Method Detail
getSupportedOptions
Set<String> getSupportedOptions()
Returns the options recognized by this processor. An implementation of the processing tool must provide a way to pass processor-specific options distinctly from options passed to the tool itself, seegetOptions
.Each string returned in the set must be a period separated sequence of identifiers:
- SupportedOptionString:
- Identifiers
- Identifiers:
- Identifier
- Identifier
.
Identifiers - Identifier:
- Syntactic identifier, including keywords and literals
A tool might use this information to determine if any options provided by a user are unrecognized by any processor, in which case it may wish to report a warning.
- Returns:
- the options recognized by this processor or an empty collection if none
- See Also:
-
SupportedOptions
getSupportedAnnotationTypes
Set<String> getSupportedAnnotationTypes()
Returns the names of the annotation types supported by this processor. An element of the result may be the canonical (fully qualified) name of a supported annotation type. Alternately it may be of the form "name.*" representing the set of all annotation types with canonical names beginning with "name.". Finally,"*"
by itself represents the set of all annotation types, including the empty set. Note that a processor should not claim"*"
unless it is actually processing all files; claiming unnecessary annotations may cause a performance slowdown in some environments.Each string returned in the set must be accepted by the following grammar:
- SupportedAnnotationTypeString:
- TypeName DotStaropt
- *
- DotStar:
- . *
- Returns:
- the names of the annotation types supported by this processor
- See Also:
-
SupportedAnnotationTypes
- See The Java™ Language Specification:
- 3.8 Identifiers, 6.5.5 Meaning of Type Names
getSupportedSourceVersion
SourceVersion getSupportedSourceVersion()
Returns the latest source version supported by this annotation processor.- Returns:
- the latest source version supported by this annotation processor.
- See Also:
-
SupportedSourceVersion
,ProcessingEnvironment.getSourceVersion()
init
void init(ProcessingEnvironment processingEnv)
Initializes the processor with the processing environment.- Parameters:
-
processingEnv
- environment for facilities the tool framework provides to the processor
process
boolean process(Set<? extends TypeElement> annotations, RoundEnvironment roundEnv)
Processes a set of annotation types on type elements originating from the prior round and returns whether or not these annotation types are claimed by this processor. Iftrue
is returned, the annotation types are claimed and subsequent processors will not be asked to process them; iffalse
is returned, the annotation types are unclaimed and subsequent processors may be asked to process them. A processor may always return the same boolean value or may vary the result based on chosen criteria.The input set will be empty if the processor supports
"*"
and the root elements have no annotations. AProcessor
must gracefully handle an empty set of annotations.- Parameters:
-
annotations
- the annotation types requested to be processed -
roundEnv
- environment for information about the current and prior round - Returns:
- whether or not the set of annotation types are claimed by this processor
getCompletions
Iterable<? extends Completion> getCompletions(Element element, AnnotationMirror annotation, ExecutableElement member, String userText)
Returns to the tool infrastructure an iterable of suggested completions to an annotation. Since completions are being asked for, the information provided about the annotation may be incomplete, as if for a source code fragment. A processor may return an empty iterable. Annotation processors should focus their efforts on providing completions for annotation members with additional validity constraints known to the processor, for example anint
member whose value should lie between 1 and 10 or a string member that should be recognized by a known grammar, such as a regular expression or a URL.Since incomplete programs are being modeled, some of the parameters may only have partial information or may be
null
. At least one ofelement
anduserText
must be non-null
. Ifelement
is non-null
,annotation
andmember
may benull
. Processors may not throw aNullPointerException
if some parameters arenull
; if a processor has no completions to offer based on the provided information, an empty iterable can be returned. The processor may also return a single completion with an empty value string and a message describing why there are no completions.Completions are informative and may reflect additional validity checks performed by annotation processors. For example, consider the simple annotation:
@MersennePrime { int value(); }
AnnotationMirror
for this annotation type, a list of all such primes in theint
range could be returned without examining any other arguments togetCompletions
:import static javax.annotation.processing.Completions.*; ... return Arrays.asList(
of
("3"), of("7"), of("31"), of("127"), of("8191"), of("131071"), of("524287"), of("2147483647"));return Arrays.asList(
of
("3", "M2"), of("7", "M3"), of("31", "M5"), of("127", "M7"), of("8191", "M13"), of("131071", "M17"), of("524287", "M19"), of("2147483647", "M31"));userText
is available, it can be checked to see if only a subset of the Mersenne primes are valid. For example, if the user has typed
the value of@MersennePrime(1
userText
will be"1"
; and only two of the primes are possible completions:return Arrays.asList(of("127", "M7"), of("131071", "M17"));
An appropriate response in this case is to either return an empty list of completions,@MersennePrime(9
return Collections.emptyList();
return Arrays.asList(of("", "No in-range Mersenne primes start with 9"));
- Parameters:
-
element
- the element being annotated -
annotation
- the (perhaps partial) annotation being applied to the element -
member
- the annotation member to return possible completions for -
userText
- source code text to be completed - Returns:
- suggested completions to the annotation
-
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