How can I find Annotated methods in Scala/Java on Runtime

Question

I want to use Runtime Reflection with Scala annotations (could also be a Java annoations if necessary, but I would prefer to limit pure Java code)

I want to implement something like:

/**
  print all methods that implement a specific annotation
*/
 def getAllAnnotated(): Unit {...}

For example, if I have:

class Foo {
    @printme
    def foo(args: A): R
    
    def oof(args: A): R
}
class Bar {
    @printme
    def bar(): Unit
}

The result of running getAllAnnotated() would be something like:

Foo.foo
Bar.bar

Note that I don't want to look in a specific class, but instead any available method

Answer 1

Try one of classpath scanners based on Java reflection (e.g. Reflections) + scala-reflect. Since we use Java reflection only to look for classes and scala-reflect to look for annotated methods, annotations can be written in Scala.

import org.reflections.Reflections
import org.reflections.scanners.SubTypesScanner
import org.reflections.util.{ClasspathHelper, ConfigurationBuilder}
import scala.annotation.StaticAnnotation
import scala.jdk.CollectionConverters._
import scala.reflect.runtime.currentMirror
import scala.reflect.runtime.universe._

class printme extends StaticAnnotation

val reflections = new Reflections(
  (new ConfigurationBuilder)
    .setUrls(ClasspathHelper.forPackage(""))
    .setScanners(new SubTypesScanner(false))
)

def getAllAnnotated(): Unit =
  reflections.getAllTypes.asScala
    .flatMap(className =>
      currentMirror.classSymbol(Class.forName(className))
        .toType
        .decls
        .filter(symbol =>
          symbol.isMethod && symbol.annotations.exists(_.tree.tpe =:= typeOf[printme])
        )
        .map(method => s"$className.${method.name}")
    ).foreach(println)

Alternatives to Reflections library are for example ClassGraph and Burningwave. If we replace scala-reflect with Java reflection then annotation will have to be written in Java because only annotations written in Java are visible at runtime with Java reflection.

Answer 2

In Java you can scan for the classes in the package using reflection Using Reflections to get all classes of the package and then recursively go inside all the classes to find the annotations.