jakarta.xml.bind.annotation.XmlSeeAlso Maven / Gradle / Ivy
/*
* Copyright (c) 2006, 2021 Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
*
* This program and the accompanying materials are made available under the
* terms of the Eclipse Distribution License v. 1.0, which is available at
* http://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/edl-v10.php.
*
* SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause
*/
package jakarta.xml.bind.annotation;
import jakarta.xml.bind.JAXBContext;
import java.lang.annotation.ElementType;
import java.lang.annotation.Retention;
import static java.lang.annotation.RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME;
import java.lang.annotation.Target;
/**
* Instructs Jakarta XML Binding to also bind other classes when binding this class.
*
*
* Java makes it impractical/impossible to list all sub-classes of
* a given class. This often gets in a way of Jakarta XML Binding users, as it Jakarta XML Binding
* cannot automatically list up the classes that need to be known
* to {@link JAXBContext}.
*
*
* For example, with the following class definitions:
*
*
* class Animal {}
* class Dog extends Animal {}
* class Cat extends Animal {}
*
*
*
* The user would be required to create {@link JAXBContext} as
* {@code JAXBContext.newInstance(Dog.class,Cat.class)}
* ({@code Animal} will be automatically picked up since {@code Dog}
* and {@code Cat} refers to it.)
*
*
* {@link XmlSeeAlso} annotation would allow you to write:
*
* @XmlSeeAlso({Dog.class,Cat.class})
* class Animal {}
* class Dog extends Animal {}
* class Cat extends Animal {}
*
*
*
* This would allow you to do {@code JAXBContext.newInstance(Animal.class)}.
* By the help of this annotation, Jakarta XML Binding implementations will be able to
* correctly bind {@code Dog} and {@code Cat}.
*
* @author Kohsuke Kawaguchi
* @since 1.6, JAXB 2.1
*/
@Target({ElementType.TYPE})
@Retention(RUNTIME)
public @interface XmlSeeAlso {
Class[] value();
}