Description Walter Harley 2006-08-24 16:55:40 EDT

Types which appear as values in annotation elements within binary types are surfacing as unresolved bindings, even after they have otherwise been resolved.

That is, if an annotation like @Anno(IFoo.class) shows up on a type in a jar file, when APT tries to read the annotation value it gets a TypeBinding that is internally represented with an UnresolvedReferenceBinding and therefore gives wrong answers to questions like isInterface() or getQualifiedName().

The attached repro case consists of the following:

  1. annoval-binary.jar contains an interface definition, an annotation definition with an element of type Class, and some base classes A and B which are annotated with the annotation.

  2. anno-val.zip, which is a plug-in project that creates an annotation processor.

  3. anno-val-target.zip, which is a Java project that declares a class C that extends B and that is annotated.  This project needs annoval-binary.jar to be on  its classpath.

To reproduce the problem, import the anno-val project into a host workspace.  Then debug the resulting plug-in as an Eclipse application.  In the debug Eclipse instance, import the anno-val-target project and ensure that annoval-binary is on its classpath (may require editing the path).

Watch the console output in the host workspace, as the target workspace is built.  You will see output like this:

source.C.f(): val = intf.IFoo.IBar
binary.B.f(): val = intf.IFoo$IBar
binary.A.f(): val = intf.IFoo$IBar

Note that the output for classes B and A shows the IBar interface delimited with a '$' rather than a '.'; this is because the getQualifiedName() API returned the wrong thing, which is one sign of the unresolved reference.  But note also that the value was resolved correctly for class C, which got evaluated first.

If there's something that APT is doing wrong under the covers in getting these declarations, please let me know.  The creation of the parser is done in BaseProcessorEnv.createASTs(), with the following code:

		ASTParser p = ASTParser.newParser( AST.JLS3 );
		p.setResolveBindings( true );
		p.setProject( javaProject );
		p.setKind( ASTParser.K_COMPILATION_UNIT );
		p.createASTs( parseUnits, keys,  requestor, null);