What is Type & TypeToken?

Question

I have the following method in my project

 public void execute(final int apiId, final ResponseHandler handler, final Type type)

and the typ

Answer 1

From the link you provided:

Forces clients to create a subclass of this class which enables retrieval the type information even at runtime.

Let's speak with example.

Assume you want to parse a JSON to Java class with Gson library. Now, you have to specifically tell Gson, that:

I want this JSON to be translated to a List of User objects

How would you tell that to Gson? If it was only User, you could tell User.class. But it isn't possible to say List.class

new Gson().fromJson(json, new TypeToken>(){}.getType())

But now you can specify precisely that Gson should convert it to a List of Users.

Should quote explanation from docs:

Represents a generic type T. Java doesn't yet provide a way to represent generic types, so this class does.

Have a look at this blog post for more details on the topic.