Issue a compilation error and return an exception that, when thrown, will cause the processing of this class to be abandoned. This does not prevent the processing of other classes.

Annotations

@FormatMethod

Returns true if parameterType can be used to provide the value of an annotation member of type memberType. They must either be the same type, or the member type must be an array and the parameter type must be a collection of a compatible type.

We compute a serialVersionUID for the generated class based on the names and types of the annotation members that the @AutoAnnotation method defines. These are exactly the names and types of the instance fields in the generated class. So in the common case where the annotation acquires a new member with a default value, if the @AutoAnnotation method is not changed then the generated class will acquire an implementation of the new member method which just returns the default value. The serialVersionUID will not change, which makes sense because the instance fields haven't changed, and instances that were serialized before the new member was added should deserialize fine. On the other hand, if you then add a parameter to the @AutoAnnotation method for the new member, the implementation class will acquire a new instance field, and we will compute a different serialVersionUID. That's because an instance serialized before that change would not have a value for the new instance field, which would end up zero or null. Users don't expect annotation methods to return null so that would be bad.

We could instead add a readObject(ObjectInputStream) method that would check that all of the instance fields are really present in the deserialized instance, and perhaps replace them with their default values from the annotation if not. That seems a lot more complicated than is justified, though, especially since the instance fields are final and would have to be set in the deserialized object through reflection.

Returns the hashCode of the given AnnotationValue, if that hashCode is guaranteed to be always the same. The hashCode of a String or primitive type never changes. The hashCode of a Class or an enum constant does potentially change in different runs of the same program. The hashCode of an array doesn't change if the hashCodes of its elements don't. Although we could have a similar rule for nested annotation values, we currently don't.

Returns a map from the names of members with invariable hashCodes to the values of those hashCodes.

Issue a compilation error. This method does not throw an exception, since we want to continue processing and perhaps report other errors.

Annotations

@FormatMethod

Returns the wrapper types (Integer.class etc) that are used in collection parameters like List<Integer>. This is needed because we will emit a helper method for each such type, for example to convert Collection<Integer> into int[].