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

One way is to make the classes use a static initializers... I don't think these are inherited (it won't work if they are):

public class Dog extends Animal{

static
{
   Animal a = new Dog();
   //add a to the List
}

It requires you to add this code to all of the classes involved. But it avoids having a big ugly loop somewhere, testing every class searching for children of Animal.