StackOverflow-ers! I am building a game, namely Volts of Doom, in which users can write and place their own mods into a folder, which will then be loaded into the game (similarly to something like Minecraft Forge, except this game is designed to be modded).
A mod is declared with an @Mod Annotation, (seen below). Currently, I can find jar file in the correct /mods/ directory, and can then find classes annotated with @Mod. The problem arises when I try to read the modid from the classes' @Mod annotation.
I am using Google Reflections, whose getTypesAnnotatedWith(Annotation.class) method returns a Set<Class<?>> of annotated classes, but as the elements are of the type Class<?>, and not the type @Mod, I can't access that necessary value.
How can I retrieve that value, if all I get are compiler errors and ClassCastExceptions when I try to retrieve the modid or cast the class to a format which I can access the modid from? I understand why the exceptions are occurring (cannot cast a superclass to a subclass, etc), but I can't find a solution.... Any ideas?
I will provide a sample of the not-working code I am using for this currently.
//Make the annotation available at runtime:
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
//Allow to use only on types:
@Target(ElementType.TYPE)
public @interface Mod {
String modid();
}
Reflections reflections = new Reflections(new URLClassLoader("My Class Loader")), new SubTypesScanner(false), new TypeAnnotationsScanner());
Set<Class<?>> set = reflections.getTypesAnnotatedWith(Mod.class);
//cannot access modid from this set :(
Set<Class<?>> set = reflections.getTypesAnnotatedWith(Mod.class);
gets you the types that were annotated, if you wish to examine the annotations themselves, you need to look at them too, for example in the following way
for(Class<?> clazz : set) {
Mod mod = clazz.getAnnotation(Mod.class);
mod.modid();
}