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Class Literals as Runtime-Type Tokens

One of the changes in JDK 5.0 is that the class java.lang.Class is generic. It's an interesting example of using genericity for something other than a container class.

Now that Class has a type parameter T, you might well ask, what does T stand for? It stands for the type that the Class object is representing.

For example, the type of String.class is Class<String>, and the type of Serializable.class is Class<Serializable>. This can be used to improve the type safety of your reflection code.

In particular, since the newInstance() method in Class now returns a T, you can get more precise types when creating objects reflectively.

For example, suppose you need to write a utility method that performs a database query, given as a string of SQL, and returns a collection of objects in the database that match that query.

One way is to pass in a factory object explicitly, writing code like:

interface Factory<T> { T make();} 

public <T> Collection<T> select(Factory<T> factory, String statement) { 
    Collection<T> result = new ArrayList<T>(); 
    /* Run sql query using jdbc */  
    for (/* Iterate over jdbc results. */) { 
        T item = factory.make();
        /* Use reflection and set all of item's fields from sql results. */ 
        result.add(item); 
    } 
    return result; 
}

You can call this either as

select(new Factory<EmpInfo>(){ public EmpInfo make() {
                               return new EmpInfo();
                               }}
      , "selection string");

or you can declare a class EmpInfoFactory to support the Factory interface

class EmpInfoFactory implements Factory<EmpInfo> {
    ...
    public EmpInfo make() { return new EmpInfo();}
}

and call it

select(getMyEmpInfoFactory(), "selection string");

The downside of this solution is that it requires either:

the use of verbose anonymous factory classes at the call site, or
declaring a factory class for every type used and passing a factory instance at the call site, which is somewhat unnatural.

It is natural to use the class literal as a factory object, which can then be used by reflection. Today (without generics) the code might be written:

Collection emps = sqlUtility.select(EmpInfo.class, "select * from emps");
...
public static Collection select(Class c, String sqlStatement) { 
    Collection result = new ArrayList();
    /* Run sql query using jdbc. */
    for (/* Iterate over jdbc results. */ ) { 
        Object item = c.newInstance(); 
        /* Use reflection and set all of item's fields from sql results. */  
        result.add(item); 
    } 
    return result; 
}

However, this would not give us a collection of the precise type we desire. Now that Class is generic, we can instead write the following:

Collection<EmpInfo> emps = 
                      sqlUtility.select(EmpInfo.class, "select * from emps");
...
public static <T> Collection<T> select(Class<T> c, String sqlStatement) { 
    Collection<T> result = new ArrayList<T>();
    /* Run sql query using jdbc. */
    for (/* Iterate over jdbc results. */ ) { 
        T item = c.newInstance(); 
        /* Use reflection and set all of item's fields from sql results. */  
        result.add(item);
    } 
    return result; 
}

The above code gives us the precise type of collection in a type safe way.

This technique of using class literals as run time type tokens is a very useful trick to know. It's an idiom that's used extensively in the new APIs for manipulating annotations, for example.

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