At runtime, find all classes in a Java application that extend a base class

Question

I want to do something like this:

List animals = new ArrayList();

for( Class c: list_of_all_classes_available_to_my_app() )
   i         


        

Answer 1

Java dynamically loads classes, so your universe of classes would be only those that have already been loaded (and not yet unloaded). Perhaps you can do something with a custom class loader that could check the supertypes of each loaded class. I don't think there's an API to query the set of loaded classes.