Module java.compiler
Package javax.annotation.processing

Interface Processor

All Known Implementing Classes:
AbstractProcessor
public interface Processor
The interface for an annotation processor.

Annotation processing happens in a sequence of rounds. On each round, a processor may be asked to process a subset of the annotations found on the source and class files produced by a prior round. The inputs to the first round of processing are the initial inputs to a run of the tool; these initial inputs can be regarded as the output of a virtual zeroth round of processing. If a processor was asked to process on a given round, it will be asked to process on subsequent rounds, including the last round, even if there are no annotations for it to process. The tool infrastructure may also ask a processor to process files generated implicitly by the tool's operation.

Each implementation of a Processor must provide a public no-argument constructor to be used by tools to instantiate the processor. The tool infrastructure will interact with classes implementing this interface as follows:

  1. If an existing Processor object is not being used, to create an instance of a processor the tool calls the no-arg constructor of the processor class.
  2. Next, the tool calls the init method with an appropriate ProcessingEnvironment.
  3. Afterwards, the tool calls getSupportedAnnotationTypes, getSupportedOptions, and getSupportedSourceVersion. These methods are only called once per run, not on each round.
  4. As appropriate, the tool calls the process method on the Processor object; a new Processor object is not created for each round.
If a processor object is created and used without the above protocol being followed, then the processor's behavior is not defined by this interface specification.

The tool uses a discovery process to find annotation processors and decide whether or not they should be run. By configuring the tool, the set of potential processors can be controlled. For example, for a JavaCompiler the list of candidate processors to run can be set directly or controlled by a search path used for a service-style lookup. Other tool implementations may have different configuration mechanisms, such as command line options; for details, refer to the particular tool's documentation. Which processors the tool asks to run is a function of the interfaces of the annotations present on the root elements, what annotation interfaces a processor supports, and whether or not a processor claims the annotation interfaces it processes. A processor will be asked to process a subset of the annotation interfaces it supports, possibly an empty set. For a given round, the tool computes the set of annotation interfaces that are present on the elements enclosed within the root elements. If there is at least one annotation interface present, then as processors claim annotation interfaces, they are removed from the set of unmatched annotation interfaces. When the set is empty or no more processors are available, the round has run to completion. If there are no annotation interfaces present, annotation processing still occurs but only universal processors which support processing all annotation interfaces, "*", can claim the (empty) set of annotation interfaces.

An annotation interface is considered present if there is at least one annotation of that interface present on an element enclosed within the root elements of a round. For this purpose, a type parameter is considered to be enclosed by its generic element. For this purpose, a package element is not considered to enclose the top-level classes and interfaces within that package. (A root element representing a package is created when a package-info file is processed.) Likewise, for this purpose, a module element is not considered to enclose the packages within that module. (A root element representing a module is created when a module-info file is processed.) Annotations on type uses, as opposed to annotations on elements, are ignored when computing whether or not an annotation interface is present.

An annotation is present if it meets the definition of being present given in AnnotatedConstruct. In brief, an annotation is considered present for the purposes of discovery if it is directly present or present via inheritance. An annotation is not considered present by virtue of being wrapped by a container annotation. Operationally, this is equivalent to an annotation being present on an element if and only if it would be included in the results of Elements.getAllAnnotationMirrors(Element) called on that element. Since annotations inside container annotations are not considered present, to properly process repeatable annotation interfaces, processors are advised to include both the repeatable annotation interface and its containing annotation interface in the set of supported annotation interfaces of a processor.

Note that if a processor supports "*" and returns true, all annotations are claimed. Therefore, a universal processor being used to, for example, implement additional validity checks should return false so as to not prevent other such checkers from being able to run.

If a processor throws an uncaught exception, the tool may cease other active annotation processors. If a processor raises an error, the current round will run to completion and the subsequent round will indicate an error was raised. Since annotation processors are run in a cooperative environment, a processor should throw an uncaught exception only in situations where no error recovery or reporting is feasible.

The tool environment is not required to support annotation processors that access environmental resources, either per round or cross-round, in a multi-threaded fashion.

If the methods that return configuration information about the annotation processor return null, return other invalid input, or throw an exception, the tool infrastructure must treat this as an error condition.

To be robust when running in different tool implementations, an annotation processor should have the following properties:

  1. The result of processing a given input is not a function of the presence or absence of other inputs (orthogonality).
  2. Processing the same input produces the same output (consistency).
  3. Processing input A followed by processing input B is equivalent to processing B then A (commutativity)
  4. Processing an input does not rely on the presence of the output of other annotation processors (independence)

The Filer interface discusses restrictions on how processors can operate on files.

API Note:
Implementors of this interface may find it convenient to extend AbstractProcessor rather than implementing this interface directly.
Since:
1.6

  • Method Details

    • getSupportedOptions

      Set<String> getSupportedOptions()
      Returns the options recognized by this processor. An implementation of the processing tool must provide a way to pass processor-specific options distinctly from options passed to the tool itself, see getOptions.

      Each string returned in the set must be a period separated sequence of identifiers:

      SupportedOptionString:
      Identifiers
      Identifiers:
      Identifier
      Identifier . Identifiers
      Identifier:
      Syntactic identifier, including keywords and literals

      A tool might use this information to determine if any options provided by a user are unrecognized by any processor, in which case it may wish to report a warning.

      Returns:
      the options recognized by this processor or an empty set if none
      See Also:

    • getSupportedAnnotationTypes

      Set<String> getSupportedAnnotationTypes()
      Returns the names of the annotation interfaces supported by this processor. An element of the result may be the canonical (fully qualified) name of a supported annotation interface. Alternately it may be of the form "name.*" representing the set of all annotation interfaces with canonical names beginning with "name.". In either of those cases, the name of the annotation interface can be optionally preceded by a module name followed by a "/" character. For example, if a processor supports "a.B", this can include multiple annotation interfaces named a.B which reside in different modules. To only support a.B in the foo module, instead use "foo/a.B". If a module name is included, only an annotation in that module is matched. In particular, if a module name is given in an environment where modules are not supported, such as an annotation processing environment configured for a source version without modules, then the annotation interfaces with a module name do not match. Finally, "*" by itself represents the set of all annotation interfaces, including the empty set. Note that a processor should not claim "*" unless it is actually processing all files; claiming unnecessary annotations may cause a performance slowdown in some environments.

      Each string returned in the set must be accepted by the following grammar:

      SupportedAnnotationTypeString:
      ModulePrefixopt TypeName DotStaropt
      *
      ModulePrefix:
      ModuleName /
      DotStar:
      . *
      where TypeName and ModuleName are as defined in The Java Language Specification (6.5 Determining the Meaning of a Name).
      API Note:
      When running in an environment which supports modules, processors are encouraged to include the module prefix when describing their supported annotation interfaces. The method AbstractProcessor.getSupportedAnnotationTypes provides support for stripping off the module prefix when running in an environment without modules.
      Returns:
      the names of the annotation interfaces supported by this processor or an empty set if none
      See Java Language Specification:
      3.8 Identifiers
      See Also:

    • getSupportedSourceVersion

      SourceVersion getSupportedSourceVersion()
      Returns the latest source version supported by this annotation processor.
      Returns:
      the latest source version supported by this annotation processor
      See Also:

    • init

      void init(ProcessingEnvironment processingEnv)
      Initializes the processor with the processing environment.
      Parameters:
      processingEnv - environment for facilities the tool framework provides to the processor

    • process

      boolean process(Set<? extends TypeElement> annotations, RoundEnvironment roundEnv)
      Processes a set of annotation interfaces on root elements originating from the prior round and returns whether or not these annotation interfaces are claimed by this processor. If true is returned, the annotation interfaces are claimed and subsequent processors will not be asked to process them; if false is returned, the annotation interfaces are unclaimed and subsequent processors may be asked to process them. A processor may always return the same boolean value or may vary the result based on its own chosen criteria.

      The input set will be empty if the processor supports "*" and the root elements have no annotations. A Processor must gracefully handle an empty set of annotations.

      Parameters:
      annotations - the annotation interfaces requested to be processed
      roundEnv - environment for information about the current and prior round
      Returns:
      whether or not the set of annotation interfaces are claimed by this processor

    • getCompletions

      Iterable<? extends Completion> getCompletions(Element element, AnnotationMirror annotation, ExecutableElement member, String userText)
      Returns to the tool infrastructure an iterable of suggested completions to an annotation. Since completions are being asked for, the information provided about the annotation may be incomplete, as if for a source code fragment. A processor may return an empty iterable. Annotation processors should focus their efforts on providing completions for annotation members with additional validity constraints known to the processor, for example an int member whose value should lie between 1 and 10 or a string member that should be recognized by a known grammar, such as a regular expression or a URL.

      Since incomplete programs are being modeled, some of the parameters may only have partial information or may be null. At least one of element and userText must be non-null. If element is non-null, annotation and member may be null. Processors may not throw a NullPointerException if some parameters are null; if a processor has no completions to offer based on the provided information, an empty iterable can be returned. The processor may also return a single completion with an empty value string and a message describing why there are no completions.

      Completions are informative and may reflect additional validity checks performed by annotation processors. For example, consider the simple annotation: 

       @MersennePrime {
    int value();
 }
      (A Mersenne prime is prime number of the form 2n - 1.) Given an AnnotationMirror for this annotation interface, a list of all such primes in the int range could be returned without examining any other arguments to getCompletions: 
       import static javax.annotation.processing.Completions.*;
 ...
 return List.of(of("3"),
                of("7"),
                of("31"),
                of("127"),
                of("8191"),
                of("131071"),
                of("524287"),
                of("2147483647"));
      A more informative set of completions would include the number of each prime: 
       return List.of(of("3",          "M2"),
                of("7",          "M3"),
                of("31",         "M5"),
                of("127",        "M7"),
                of("8191",       "M13"),
                of("131071",     "M17"),
                of("524287",     "M19"),
                of("2147483647", "M31"));
      However, if the userText is available, it can be checked to see if only a subset of the Mersenne primes are valid. For example, if the user has typed
      @MersennePrime(1
      the value of userText will be "1"; and only two of the primes are possible completions: 
       return Arrays.asList(of("127",        "M7"),
                      of("131071",     "M17"));
      Sometimes no valid completion is possible. For example, there is no in-range Mersenne prime starting with 9:
      @MersennePrime(9
      An appropriate response in this case is to either return an empty list of completions, 
       return Collections.emptyList();
      or a single empty completion with a helpful message 
       return Arrays.asList(of("", "No in-range Mersenne primes start with 9"));
      Parameters:
      element - the element being annotated
      annotation - the (perhaps partial) annotation being applied to the element
      member - the annotation member to return possible completions for
      userText - source code text to be completed
      Returns:
      suggested completions to the annotation