Determining the Type for a generic method parameter at runtime

Question

Given the a class with the following structure. I am trying to determine the type of the parameter T assigned by the caller of the generic method.

public cl         


        

Answer 1

You can't, generics aren't available at runtime. If you had an instance of T, you could always check if T object was an instance of a specific class with instanceof.

This is due to type erasure.

An other way is to use the Class class as a parameter (see @ColinD's answer)