Support for retrieval of generic type information (JSR 14)

gotta get the parser up to snuff first

More specificly, what we need to do is to improve the QDox API to allow retrieval of generic parameters - similar to the new reflective API methods in JDK1.5. We should try to keep it as simple as possible though.

I'm tentatively bumping this to 1.7, as I think we need to concentrate on getting a "Tiger tolerant" release out the door, before worrying about how to expose generic-type data (or annotation data, for that matter). Aslak, any objection?

How does it work now? does it barf or honor an aggressive type-erasure design

Thanks guys, the project is very useful for our needs, mainly for the last two reasons mentioned on http://joe.truemesh.com/blog//000642.html (chicken and egg & javadoc and param names).

When do you plan to expose Generic types?
If two complex exposing them correctly (using their own representation) a valuable interim solution (at least for us) would be to include it as part of the Type#getValue (or a new Type#getRawValue) method.

One of the projects I'm involved in is using gwt. They struggled a bit, and so I had the change to introduce maven. I managed to mavenize the project, but when using the gwt:generateAsync only half of the classes were properly generated. This issue was the very first issue for gwt, which depends on qdox.
Of course I had to convince the other members of the power of maven, so I saw I nice challenge in this issue.
I've started on it and I'm very far.
Now it's time for writing a lot of tests, some code cleanups must be done, but I had to share this little success

Even sooner than expected, but here's my patch.
In a view words:

The parser (pojo)-classes
TypeDef has a new attribute:
public List actualArgumentTypes; // List<TypeDef>

MethodDef has changed:
String returns has been removed
TypeDef returnType has been added

FieldDef:
String type is now TypeDef type;

and a WildCardTypeDef-class has been added to support these Types

The qdox.model:
Of course Type has been modified. It has now actualArgumentType and most important
String getGenericValue()

Both ModelBuilder and JavadocBuilder has been changed to process these change properly. Important to know: the JavaDocBuilder itself still doesn't create generics (requires java5 compilation).

Tests have been modified. Every type which was representated as a String is now a (Wildcard)Type or a(Wildcard)TypeDef.

And of course modifications to parser.y for generating a new Parser together with a small adjustment in lexer.flex to get a fully clean build.

Robert, patch applied with thanks! Snapshot deployed.

Hi,

I'm new to QDOX (and Java) and try to use it for a project that takes source files and creates an UML diagram. Can please someone explain to me, how to get "ArrayList<Rectangle>" from the following source:

private ArrayList<Rectangle> getLines()
{
}

if i use JavaMethod.getValue() or JavaMethod.getGenericValue() i always get "ArrayList" as result. With getGenericValue i hopped to get "ArrayList<Rectangle>".

Sorry if this is not the right place to ask such questions.

Thank you,
Markus

getGenericValue() should indeed return java.util.ArrayList<java.awt.Rectangle>. I've used your method (for as far as I can predict the rest of the class) in a testcase and I get the right response. Can you write your own failing testcase?

Hello Robert, thank you very much. You are right. It was my mistake. I put the result of getGenericValue() into a JLabel and there "<" and ">" are not shown (html-tags?). Because of your answer i know it should work and did this: String methodType = javaMethod.getGenericValue().RepalaceAll("<","<").ReplaceAll(">",">");

Thank you for your help,
Markus

Hi,
Any ideas when a released will be out with this fix ?
Because we are currently blocked with this to release the gwt-maven-plugin.
Thanks !