Missing annotations in Eclipse plugin

[paulgray]

Hello everyone,

We are creating the plugin for the BIRT for creating the reports from the objects we pass to it. During the report creation phase, we will be using the graph representation of the objects network.

To provide the user-friendly graph, we decided to use annotations to indicate, which fields should be displayable and what should be their names on graph.

The annotation:

@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Target(ElementType.FIELD)
public @interface BIRTVertex {
	String displayableName() default "[unset]";
	boolean expandable() default false;
}

Then, when user points the place where the properly annotated classes are placed, we are loading them (using our own class loader) and look for the annotated fields:

for(Field f : cl.getFields()) {
	System.out.println("Checking field " + f.getName());
	if(f.isAnnotationPresent(BIRTVertex.class)) {
		System.out.println("Is annotation " + f.getName());
		BIRTVertex vertex = f.getAnnotation(BIRTVertex.class);
		DisplayableField field = new DisplayableField();
				
		field.setDisplayableName(vertex.displayableName());
		field.setExpandable(vertex.expandable());
		field.setRealName(f.getName());
		field.setField(f);
		field.setType(f.getType());
				
		if(f.isAnnotationPresent(BIRTIterable.class)) {
			field.setIterable(true);
		}
				
		fields.add(field);
	}
	System.out.println("Checked field " + f.getName());
}

It works great as long as we are testing it as a simple Java program. The result of the AnnotationGetter for:

public class Contractor {
	@BIRTVertex(displayableName = "Simple Contractor", expandable = true)
	public NameBox nm = new NameBox("SomeNAME");
}

is:

Checking field nm
Is annotation nm
Checked field nm

and everything is ok. Then comes the toughest part: we are trying to run the code inside the new eclipse application (inside the BIRT plugin). The same code (copy/paste pattern), different behavior:

Checking field nm
Checked field nm

The BIRTVertex class is available in the plugin environment, I have even loaded it manually (Class.forName).

We have tried a hundreds of configurations, classpath settings and so on: the annotations are invisible...

Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong or propose the solution of the problem?

[ahfang09]

I meet the same prolem.If someone knows the problem and solved it ,please mail to ahfang09@163.com.I appreciate your help very much.

[paulgray]

The problem was with the fields permissions: in the annotation definition, there should be:

public String displayableName() default "[unset]";
public boolean expandable() default false;

instead of:

String displayableName() default "[unset]";
boolean expandable() default false;

After that small change everything works smoothly...