Java Projects - Second Edition

Invoking methods

In this example, we used only a single reflection call to get the annotations attached to a class. Reflection can do many more things. Handling annotations is the most important use of these calls since annotations do not have their own functionality and cannot be handled in any other way during runtime. Reflection, however, does not stop telling us what annotations a class or any other annotation holding element has. Reflection can be used to get a list of the methods of a class, the name of the methods as strings, the implemented interfaces of a class, the parent class it extends, the fields, the types of fields, and so on. Reflection generally provides methods and classes to walk through the actual code structure down ...