Is there a way to annotate the INSTANCE field of kotlin objects? - java

I have a Kotlin object that has several fields exposed as static #JvmFields. The parser that I use (which I cannot edit or change) looks for public static fields and creates a configuration file based on those. Since the INSTANCE field is public too, the parser generates a new category called instance. Is there a way to add actual annotations to the INSTANCE field? I would want to add the #Ingore annotation to it so the parser does not use the INSTANCE field.

Basically, the answer is no, Kotlin does not allow annotating or altering the INSTANCE fields in any other way. If you believe this could be a useful feature, please file a feature request at kotl.in/issue.
The valid solutions to this problem are:
Make the bytecode analyzing tool Kotlin-aware, i.e. make it behave correctly with Kotlin declarations. Though this requires non-trivial job to be done and does not seem possible in your case, it could be a valuable time investment.
Create another ad-hoc tool that post-processes the classes produced by the Kotlin compiler and adds the annotations you need, then include that tool into your build.

Related

Design a custom annotation to invoke a method in a jar

I'm a bit new to annotations in Java. Is it possible to design a custom annotation which when used in a class automatically invokes a method present inside another Class. TIA.
The answer is "sort of": annotations by themselves do nothing (except "compile time" annotations that affect the compile process).
Meaning: just attaching an annotation to something doesn't magically cause a method to be called at some arbitrary point in time.
This works differently: you have some sort of framework - and at some point you ask the framework to process an object, class, ... And then the framework might check for the presence of certain annotations to "do" something based on that check.
Thus: it is possible to implement custom annotations, and it is also possible to make some "framework" react to the presence of that annotation.
In case you find this answer too generic - well, it can't be more precise/specific than the question ...

How to understand annotation in java And How to implement my annotation in java?

What I have known are:
annotation was added in java 5
annotation can be using in method, class, and property
annotation can work in RUNTIME, CLASS, SOURCE( I don't know how to work with CLASS and SOURCE, and their's features)
annotation with retention which is RUNTIME can be implement when java program is running.
And I want to implement a annotation to have follows features:
ensure class only being allowed to create a instance
ensure methods only being allowed to access method in the class
it is like as friend in c++
it is same as public and private , but more dynamicall, like
#MyAnnotation(allowMethods={xxx.doSomething})
public void getValue(){}
the getValues method only can be accessed in the instance self and xxx.doSomething() method
What should I do and learn in next?
And Where can I learn about these?
I think you might be misunderstanding something there. Annotations are descriptive elements, not parts of your program. You can write as many annotations as you want, and people who use your code will still be able to ignore them.
That said, an annotation that enforces a policy (as yours does) can actually be implemented, either at compile or at runtime, but you need an external mechanism to help you. I can think of 3:
Annotation processing lets you interact with the compiler and process annotations by generating code or by omitting compiler errors. Unfortunately, I don't think it will work for your case, as you want to protect your annotated type from instantiation, and that means the call site doesn't actually have an annotation. Annotation processing only gives you access to the actual code pieces that have annotations, not to those that refer to them.
AspectJ allows you to write policy enforcement aspects and omit compiler errors, based on static pointcuts. The problem here is that static pointcuts have very limited semantics, so while you could forbid the instantiation of your class altogether, or from certain packages, you could not limit the your class instantiations to 1.
The third way, and probably the only sane way is that you use a container like Spring or Guice and configure your class as singleton. As long as you only retrieve your class from the container, it will never create a second instance.
Finally: If you want to limit the number of instantiations of your class, you can always use a classic Singleton pattern approach.

How to implement an xml saveable/loadable class?

I would like to create a class, which would be loadable and saveable to an XML file. I want to use one class which is doing the loading task and I want to integrate it with the actual class that I want to save and load, everything seems to be doable up to the point where JAVA doesn't allow the class instance to be change from within the class, i.e. there is no:
this = JAXBLoader.load();
So currently that's the problem I'm facing.
And I want to be able to control the loading and saving it via the public methods from the class itself, so that from the outside I don't need any factories or managers to load it. Currently the only solution I've seen to this was if I extended the class that I want to save as an xml and then delegate all the methods to the intance of the actual class and then when loading a new instance from the file, the instance would get replaced. But it is a bit of overhead to have to delegate all of the methods, especially pain in the ass if you need to add new methods to the class and have multiple implementations...
So are there any good practices or patterns on achieving something similar or solving the problem I demonstrated above? Actually I'm open, if somebody can overall share what are the best ways to do class saving and loading the easiest ways I would really glad about it.
I'm not quite sure why do you want to avoid external factories and managers. For me it seems quite natural to extract serialization and not handle it in the model classes themselves. But okay.
What I understood is that your core problem is to load data into this instance. Here's a simple way to achieve this with JAXB.
I'm the author of JAXB2 Basics, a plugin package for JAXB/XJC. It contains the copyable plugin which generates a few copyTo methods in the schema-derived classes.
This will give you methods like copyTo(Object target). With this you can first unmarshal data from XML into some temporary instance and then copyTo(this). Something like:
MyType temporaryInstance = unmarshaller.unmarshal(source, MyType.class).getValue();
temporaryInstance.copyTo(this);
You can add this method to your schema-derived code via code injection or by subclassing.

How to extend Jackson property discovery in a "catch-all-types" way?

Following my previous question about serialization only, I'd like to go further and support JsonFormatVisitor.
I have the same requirements, that is:
I have objects of several types (interfaces).
I don't know the type of theses objets in advance.
I can't add annotations on theses types.
I can introspect all theses objets to get their state data.
Now that serialization works, I need to generate JsonSchema and hence do something like that:
SchemaFactoryWrapper visitor = WHAT?
mapper.acceptJsonFormatVisitor( mapper.constructType( Foo.class ), visitor );
JsonSchema jsonSchema = visitor.finalSchema();
String schemaString = mapper.writeValueAsString( jsonSchema );
I've implemented a SchemaFactoryWrapper that gets its expectAnyFormat called but I don't know what to do inside it. Looks like there's no schema for "any" objects.
Maybe I can hook elsewhere in jackson? Maybe it is possible to extends the whole Bean/Property introspection mechanism to support a completely different model (ie. not beans)?
I'm a bit lost, please help me find the treasure room :)
I can try to suggest some approaches that may be helpful.
First, even if you can not annotate classes directly, "mix-in annotations" can help -- this does assume static knowledge, however
Second, since schema-generation uses type detection used for serialization, you may want to register custom serializers; but this does not necessarily mean having to hand-write all. The most flexible way to register custom serializers is via Module interface (mapper.registerModule(new MyModule()); Modules can register Serializers instance which gets called when trying to locate a JsonSerializer for a type for the first time (after this, instance is cached to be re-used for other properties of same type).
This is where you could configure and return your custom JsonSerializer; but it might only need to handle schema-related callback(s) (one(s) called by schema generator).
It is also possible to extend/modify property discovery mechanism; whether this is easier depends. But the thing to look for is registering BeanSerializerModifier via Module.
It gets called during construction of BeanSerializer (general POJO serializer used unless something more specific is registered), and with it you can add/modify properties; or just replace resulting serializer altogether (and also then allows chaining of custom serializer with default one, if needed).

Changing names of properties while Serializing to JSON without source code

Need to serialize java objects to JSON while doing compression such as name change, exclusion etc. Objects use class from jar, source code of which is not available.
Looked through many libraries(Jackson , Gson), but found none solving this particular problem. Most of them are annotations based, which I can't use given I don't have source code.
One way to solve this problems is, use reflection and recursively go through object until you find a property name of which should be replaced or object is excluded in serialized JSON.
Need solution for this. Better if it is already implemented and tested.
You can also have a look at Genson library http://code.google.com/p/genson/.
You can rename and filter with quite concise code:
// renames all "fieldOfName" to "toName", excludes from serialization
// and deserialization fields named "fieldNamed" and declared in DefinedInClass
// and uses fields with all visibility (protected, private, etc)
Genson genson = new Genson.Builder().rename("fieldOfName", "toName")
.exclude("fieldNamed", DefinedInClass.class)
.setFieldFilter(VisibilityFilter.ALL)
.create();
genson.serialize(myObject);
If you want to do some more complex filtering (based on annotations for example) you can implement BeanMutatorAccessorResolver or extend BaseResolver.
Same for property renaming you can implement PropertyNameResolver and have full control.
And finally if you want to filter fields, methods or constructors according to their modifiers you can define your own VisiblityFilter.
Concerning performances of filtering/renaming there should be no problem as it is done only once per class and then cached.
To start using Genson you can have a look at the Getting Started Guide.
Found solution to the problem.
Google gson has class called GsonBuilder which has methods for exclusion strategy and naming strategy.
Using these two methods implemented a custom solution, where all the mapping and exclusion rules are stored using a xml and used at the time of serialization and de-serialization.
Works perfectly, though not sure about the performance of same.

Categories

Resources