James later wrote some code to do this, which is in a
branch of Commons Proxy. I think we should add
something similar to the reflect subpackage (in trunk)
of the [lang] component, given the fact that BeanUtils
is in maintenance mode.
-Matt
--- Simone Gianni <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi all,
> sorry for reopening such an old thread, but it's the
> latest I've found
> searching for "generics".
>
> As James say, it is quite a pain to determine types
> in a generic class.
> I think commons could be a good place for a library
> that makes this
> operation easier, maybe in beanutils since its
> mission is to "provide
> easy-to-use wrappers around [these capabilities |
> Reflection and
> Introspection]", and I'm writing such a "library"
> (actually classes
> wrapping Class, Method etc..) in my Apache Lab.
>
> More in depth explanation follows.
>
> While it is not possible for purely runtime types,
> like local variables,
> it is still possible for subclasses explicitly
> extending a generic type
> with concrete types and for fields declared as non
> generics to obtain
> vital informations about the type of generic fields
> and generic method
> parameters.
>
> What I'm saying is that in both following cases :
> private List<String> names;
> public class People implement List<Person> { }
>
> It is possible to determine the fact that the
> People.add() method will
> accept a Person, and the names.get() method will
> return a String.
> Unfortunately, it is quite complex to determine it,
> cause Sun decided to
> use only 4 interfaces, and force the user to make
> continuous blind casts
> between them.
>
> JRE currently seems not to provide an alternative
> simple solution, nor
> using reflection nor introspection. Even worse,
> given the following
> generic class :
>
> public GenericBean<T> {
> private T myGeneric;
> public T getMyGeneric() { return myGeneric; }
> public void setMyGeneric(T v) { myGeneric = v; }
> }
>
> Even subclassing it like "PersonBean extends
> GenericBean<Person>",
> Introspection (and so BeanUtils) will return the
> type of the myGeneric
> property as java.lang.Object, but trying to set the
> property to any
> value which is not a Person will cause a
> ClassCastException at runtime
> because of explicit cast in bridging methods
> (methods which also create
> more noise during reflection).
>
> Not to mention if only the getter or only the setter
> gets overridden in
> a subclass: in that case the compiler requires that
> the "concrete" type
> is used, thus making the getters and setter appear
> as having different
> types, and causing problems both in Introspector and
> BeanUtils.
>
> I had this problem recently in my Apache Lab, and
> wrote a (simple, not
> yet complete nor optimized, but functioning) wrapper
> around Class and
> Method to obtain this informations. It works also in
> obscure situations
> where a generics is extended by a chain of classes
> and determining the
> actual type require recursion on superclasses while
> remapping all
> generic declarations from the "concrete" one up to
> the generic one.
>
> I don't think it is yet able to handle all possible
> situations, but I
> think it covers that 70% of use cases which
> represent a good starting
> point. The code is already Apache licensed and
> "junited" and can be
> found on the Magma lab svn here
>
http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/labs/magma/foundation-basics/src/main/java/org/apache/magma/basics/utils/GenericClass.java
> .
>
> While generics are not "the hot buzzword of the
> month" anymore, usage of
> introspection and reflection is gaining more and
> more importance since
> more and more frameworks are depending on it and
> gaining popularity
> (JPA, IOC containers like Spring, alternative
> serializations like JSON
> and so on), and many of them are currently dealing
> with the generics
> problems with custom code.
>
> WDYT?
>
> Simone
>
>
> James Carman wrote:
> > Does anyone have code that can take care of this
> situation:
> >
> > List<String> strings = new ArrayList<String>();
> >
> > Class returnType =
> getReturnType(strings.getClass(), "get", int.class);
> >
> > I want the "returnType" to be java.lang.String.
> Does anyone have code
> > that would return that? Is it possible?
> >
> >
>
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> >
>
>
> --
> Simone Gianni CEO Semeru s.r.l.
> Apache Committer
> MALE human being programming a computer
> http://www.simonegianni.it/
>
>
>
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