Using a Visitor to extract Java methods that have a specific annotation

[Richard Lewis]

I'm building a JNI interface for an Excel add-in that extracts methods and method arguments from a JAVA source file only if there is a specific annotation on that method. Later I will use StringTemplate to generate the XLL C++ wrapper functions.  I'm using the antlr4 java grammar and a Visitor since I don't need to parse methods that do not have this annotation. What I've done works, I'm wondering if there is a simpler way to accomplish the same thing.  Essentially if a classBodyDeclaration has an @XLFunction annotation I parse the rest of the tree otherwise I ignore it. 

       @Override

       public JavaClass visitClassBodyDeclaration(JavaParser.ClassBodyDeclarationContext ctx)

       {

            String xpath = "//annotationName/qualifiedName/*"; // get all annotations

            for (ParseTree t : XPath.findAll(ctx, xpath, parser) ) {

                if ( t instanceof TerminalNode) {

                                     if ("XLFunction".equals(((TerminalNode)t).getText()))

                        return visitChildren(ctx);

                }

            }

            return cls;

       }

I have tried: "String xpath = //annotationName/qualifiedName/'XLFunction'" but it returns an exception. 

On return JavaClass contains the className, methods that have the XLFunction annotation and a list of arguments. I've attached code for reference. 

One bug I haven't figured out yet is that 

JavaClass cls = visitor.visit(tree);

returns null so I have to call explicitly:

visitor.getJavaClass();

[Eric Vergnaud]

Hi,

by curiosity, why don't you introspect the compiled java classes?

Eric

[Richard Lewis]

Which is now what I'm doing. I've given up and I'm using the javadoc utility to generate the source output via extending Doclet and using StringTemplate.... much easier.