Annotation to make available generic type

Posted by mdma on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by mdma
Published on 2010-06-12T00:18:35Z Indexed on 2010/06/12 0:22 UTC
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Given an generic interface like

interface DomainObjectDAO<T>
{
   T newInstance();
   add(T t);
   remove(T t);
   T findById(int id);
   // etc...    
}

I'd like to create a subinterface that specifies the type parameter:

  interface CustomerDAO extends DomainObjectDAO<Customer> 
  {
       // customer-specific queries - incidental.
  }

The implementation needs to know the actual template parameter type, but of course type erasure means isn't available at runtime. Is there some annotation that I could include to declare the interface type? Something like

  @GenericParameter(Customer.class)
  interface CustomerDAO extends DomainObjectDAO<Customer> 
  {
  }

The implementation could then fetch this annotation from the interface and use it as a substitute for runtime generic type access.

Some background:

This interface is implemented using JDK dynamic proxies as outlined here. The non-generic version of this interface has been working well, but it would be nicer to use generics and not have to create a subinterface for each domain object type. The actual type is needed at runtime to implement the newInstance method, amongst others.

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