CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaclassinheritancereflectionparent
Variadicism
Variadicism

Reputation: 654

How do I retrieve a child Class for Java reflection?

So, this is going to sound like an odd question, but I need to know how to get the Class object of a child Object in an inheritance situation for Java reflection.

The situation is this: I'm writing CraftBukkit plugins, Java plugins that work with CraftBukkit, a server-side-only plugin A.P.I. for Minecraft. At the moment, I'm making a plugin that is supposed to be like a "parent" to all of the other plugins I'm writing. It contains large amounts of extra useful Objects and utilities.

One class in the plugin is an Object class called myPlugin that I want all the main classes of all the other plugins to extend. (I know Object names shouldn't start with a lowercase letter, but the lowercase "my" is a trademark with my CraftBukkit plugins.)

One of the things that I want this myPlugin class to do is be able to handle commands to load plugins' data. Therefore, when the command is called, I want the plugin to basically call all of the methods in the plugin's main class that start with "load".

I know how to search through all the Methods in the Class for ones starting with "load" if I can just retrieve the Class, but if I try to call getClass() in the myPlugin class, I believe it's just going to return the myPlugin Class instead of the Class that extends myPlugin.

So, how can I retrieve the Class that extends myPlugin instead of the myPlugin class itself?

EDIT: I feel that I should mention that I've considered creating an abstract method called mainClass() that will return the Class and making each plugin add this method and return their main class, but this is an ugly fix that I would prefer to avoid.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1442

Answers (1)

Nick
Nick

Reputation: 114

No it's the subclass name that is returned, consider:

public class ClassOne {

}

public class ClassTwo extends ClassOne {

}

public class Test {

    public void someMethod(ClassOne one) {

        System.out.println(one.getClass().getName());
    }

}

public class Main {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        ClassTwo t = new ClassTwo();
        Test tst = new Test();
        tst.someMethod(t);
    }

}

The output is: ClassTwo

Upvotes: 2

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