Java Reflection without qualified name

Question

I am trying to do Java Reflection using Class c = Class.forName(className)

I want to pass in the className without specifying the package n

Answer 1

One simple option would be to have a list of candidate packages:

for (String pkg : packages) {
    String fullyQualified = pkg + "." + className;
    try {
        return Class.forName(fullyQualified);
    } catch (ClassNotFoundException e) {
        // Oops. Try again with the next package
    }
}

This won't be the nicest code in the world, admittedly...

You may be able to make it faster by looking for alternative calls (e.g. ClassLoader.getResource) which don't throw exceptions if the class isn't found.

There's certainly nothing I'm aware of to allow you to find a class without specifying a name at all.