Java Annotations values provided in dynamic manner

Question

I want to provide annotations with some values generated by some methods.

I tried this so far:

public @interface MyInterface {
    String aString();
}

---

@MyInterface(aString = MyClass.GENERIC_GENERATED_NAME)
public class MyClass {

    static final String GENERIC_GENERATED_NAME = MyClass.generateName(MyClass.class);

    public static final String generateName(final Class<?> c) {
        return c.getClass().getName();
    }
}

Thought GENERIC_GENERATED_NAME is static final, it complains that

The value for annotation attribute MyInterface.aString must be a constant expression

So how to achieve this ?

Answer 1

There is no way to dynamically generate a string used in an annotation. The compiler evaluates annotation metadata for RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME annotations at compile time, but GENERIC_GENERATED_NAME isn't known until runtime. And you can't use generated values for annotations that are RetentionPolicy.SOURCE because they are discarded after compile time, so those generated values would never be known.