IllegalAccessException after updating 2.1 to 2.2

[Werner Lehmann]

Hi,

today I updated from 2.1 to 2.2 - and received an exception during FXML 
loading which was not present in 2.1. Apparently the 2.2 loader looks 
for an "initialize" method in the controller and its super classes. In 
my case it finds a protected initialize() in a legacy super class which 
is used in Swing. Later on it fails to invoke that initialize() because 
it is not made accessible (having no @FXML annotation, of course).

> Caused by: javafx.fxml.LoadException: java.lang.IllegalAccessException: Class javafx.fxml.FXMLLoader can not access a member of class mint.panel.MintContextPanel with modifiers "protected"
> 	at javafx.fxml.FXMLLoader.load(FXMLLoader.java:2184)
> 	at mint.javafx.MintFXUtils.loadWithController(MintFXUtils.java:86)
> 	... 8 more
> Caused by: java.lang.IllegalAccessException: Class javafx.fxml.FXMLLoader can not access a member of class mint.panel.MintContextPanel with modifiers "protected"
> 	at sun.reflect.Reflection.ensureMemberAccess(Unknown Source)
> 	at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Unknown Source)
> 	at javafx.fxml.FXMLLoader.load(FXMLLoader.java:2182)
> 	... 9 more

As a workaround I renamed the initialize() method to something 
completely different and that worked. But I'd rather not have to do 
this. It is legacy code, and there are several extending classes 
overriding the protected method.

Also, if the existing method in the super class was public already, 
FXMLLoader would have called initialize() unexpectedly.

Looking at the code change from 2.1 to 2.2 this seems to be done 
intentionally: now the code looks for any no-args initialize method via 
reflection if Initializable is not implemented, thus breaking backward 
compatibility.

Can we just require the non-interfaced initialize() method to be 
annotated with @FXML? That would clearly document the FX related 
intention for a very common method name...

Rgds
Werner