Hey folks! Is there any particular reason why `@Preview` annotation has `@Retention(AnnotationReten...

# compose

[Anton Shilov]

Hey folks! Is there any particular reason why @Preview annotation has @Retention(AnnotationRetention.SOURCE) but not RUNTIME ? I'm trying to build a component gallery app, and would like to find all the Preview composables using reflection. Unfortunately I cannot do it right now without using codegen. Would it make sense for me to send a PR changing retention from SOURCE to RUNTIME ?

[ephemient]

you'd need https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/157590194 first

[Vinay Gaba]

Have you tried using this - https://github.com/airbnb/Showkase

Might be exactly what you are trying to build

[ephemient]

yep, and Showkase works via annotation processing, not reflection, which avoids both the problem of the annotation not being seen at runtime, and also avoids the problem of @Composable not being reflectively invokable

[Anton Shilov]

Thanks for your answers. I've seen Showkase, and it solves very similar problem I'm trying to solve. But I'm experimenting with Jetbrains Compose so can't use it for now 😞
Regarding the reflective invocations. It is not impossible, and actually `PreviewActivity`(used to run previews on device) already uses it. So reusing the code from it should do the trick for Preview cases, but the problem is that I cannot find Preview annotated composables in runtime. I'm trying to avoid using codegen for now, but maybe it is the right way to do it😅

[Andrey Kulikov]

@nosuid

[Vinay Gaba]

When you say Jetbrains Compose do you mean Compose for Desktop? I’m definitely interested in adding support for that in Showkase. Might give it a shot at some point!

[Anton Shilov]

Yeah, I meant Compose for Desktop & KMM. The main issue is that Jetpack & Jetbrains have diffenet artifacts, but it will be addressed eventually. And then it would be pretty easy to adopt it in Showkase

[nosuid]

Sorry for the late response. We did not have a use case to make it runtime but we can consider that in a future release.