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javareflectioninheritancesuperclass

How to programmatically find list of classes that have inherited a particular class in Java

I have a class called MyClass. Is it possible to programmatically find a list of classes that have inherited MyClass? I know we can use reflection to discover all the superclasses of a given class, but can we find the subclasses?

Is it even theoretically possible to do so (as I haven't heard of a class being aware of when it is being extended) ?

Solution

  • You might want to look at the reflections library

    Using Reflections you can query your metadata such as:

    • get all subtypes of some type
    • get all types/methods/fields annotated with some annotation, w/o annotation parameters matching
    • get all resources matching matching a regular expression