@Retention(Runtime) annotations silently omitted if not in classpath?

[Dawid Weiss]

A quick follow-up: I could also get a nice internal exception by declaring:

@Buhu({Tainted.class})
public void abc()

and then calling getAnnotations() on method "abc" with Tainted.class
missing from classpath. The result is:

Exception in thread "Main Thread" java.lang.ArrayStoreException: Cannot
store sun.reflect.annotation.TypeNotPresentExceptionProxy in
[Ljava.lang.Class;
        at
sun.reflect.annotation.AnnotationParser.parseClassArray(AnnotationParser.java:653)
        at
sun.reflect.annotation.AnnotationParser.parseArray(AnnotationParser.java:460)
        at
sun.reflect.annotation.AnnotationParser.parseMemberValue(AnnotationParser.java:286)
        at
sun.reflect.annotation.AnnotationParser.parseAnnotation(AnnotationParser.java:222)
        at
sun.reflect.annotation.AnnotationParser.parseAnnotations2(AnnotationParser.java:69)
        at
sun.reflect.annotation.AnnotationParser.parseAnnotations(AnnotationParser.java:52)
        at java.lang.reflect.Method.declaredAnnotations(Method.java:693)
        at java.lang.reflect.Method.getDeclaredAnnotations(Method.java:686)
        at
java.lang.reflect.AccessibleObject.getAnnotations(AccessibleObject.java:175)

Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_01-b08)

Dawid
On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 11:34 PM, Dawid Weiss <dawid.weiss at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Hi everyone,
>
> I just discovered that Method#getDeclaredAnnotations() may or may not
> return an annotation with @Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME). Basically
> what happens is if the annotation class is present in classpath, it is
> returned. But if it isn't present in classpath, the returned array simply
> omits the missing annotation.
>
> I looked at the JLS and jsr-202 (class file format) but I can't find any
> fragment relevant to this -- where are the rules governing this? I found
> bits and pieces in the following places:
> * AnnotatedElement (TypeNotPresentException thrown if an annotation
> references a Class explicitly, not the case here),
> * OpenJDK's AnnotationParser source code -- there is clearly a distinction
> in the code between throwing/ not throwing a TypeNotPresentException, but
> no specific pointers to the rules.
>
> I would appreciate if somebody shared a link or info to where the rules of
> throw/not throw are explained. Thanks in advance,
> Dawid
>
>
>
>
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