Looking for some feedback on how to handle repeate...

# ksp

[yigit]

Looking for some feedback on how to handle repeated annotations in XProcessing (but relevant to any user of KSP). (in thread)

[yigit]

Java repeated annotations work by declaring a wrapper annotation:

@Repeatable(RepeatableJavaAnnotation.List.class)
public @interface RepeatableJavaAnnotation {
    String value();
    @interface List {
        RepeatableJavaAnnotation[] value();
    }
}

@RepeatableJavaAnnotation("x")
@RepeatableJavaAnnotation("y")
class SomeClass

when you read this in JavaAP, you only see the List version.

In KSP, you see the RepeatableJavaAnnotation if it is in source and List version if it is in .class files.

That being said, kotlin compiler does not support non-source retention repeatable annotations so the .class case can only ever happen for java source that were compiled to .class.
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/KT-12794

My initial plan was to make people use the List version in XProcessing to query those but that cannot work because the Repeatable annotation in Kotlin does not have a container parameter (hence even if i can detect it is a repeatable annotation when parsing annotations from ksp, i cannot find its container).

So what I'm considering right now is to provide:

XAnnotated.getAnnotations(baseClass, containerClass = null): List<XAnnotationBox>

and also remove toAnntoationBox(annotationClass):XAnnotationBox?

it is an ugly API but not sure what else to do.
Looking for any feedback but also wanted to raise this here as more people might be hitting this repeated annotation issue.

[yigit]

hmm actually, because we ask you to pass the annotation, we can actually discover the container via reflection hmm

[yigit]

ok yea that works.

[yigit]

need to figure out behavior for hasAnnotation though...

[yigit]

https://android-review.googlesource.com/c/platform/frameworks/support/+/1646246

[yigit]

tl;dr; i was able to keep getAnnotations(KCLass) and just find the container via reflection (and handle inconsistencies between ksp javap internally)

[yigit]

it just won't work consistently if someone passes the container annotation instead of the repeatable annotation but there is no way to detect that because container annotation does not have a reference to the contained annotation 🤷 (it kind of does via value but that seemed a bit too much work to do just to detect the error)

[Alex Vanyo]

Just looked around at a surface level, but I was wondering how does XAnnotated.getAnnotations relate to AnnotatedConstruct.getAnnotationsByType?

I currently have a repeatable annotation (defined in Kotlin) that I am generating code with with kapt and ksp (I’ve written the processing code twice for those, with a shared code generation portion).

On the kapt side, I’m using getAnnotationsByType to get consistent behavior with ksp