How to obtain all subclasses of a given sealed class?

Question

Recently we upgraded one of our enum class to sealed class with objects as sub-classes so we can make another tier of abstraction to simplify code. However we c

Answer 1

In Kotlin 1.3+ you can use sealedSubclasses.

In prior versions, if you nest the subclasses in your base class then you can use nestedClasses:

Base::class.nestedClasses

If you nest other classes within your base class then you'll need to add filtering. e.g.:

Base::class.nestedClasses.filter { it.isFinal && it.isSubclassOf(Base::class) }

Note that this gives you the subclasses and not the instances of those subclasses (unlike Enum.values()).

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With your particular example, if all of your nested classes in State are your object states then you can use the following to get all of the instances (like Enum.values()):

State::class.nestedClasses.map { it.objectInstance as State }

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And if you want to get really fancy you can even extend Enum> and create your own class hierarchy from it to your concrete objects using reflection. e.g.:

sealed class State(name: String, ordinal: Int) : Enum(name, ordinal) {
    companion object {
        @JvmStatic private val map = State::class.nestedClasses
                .filter { klass -> klass.isSubclassOf(State::class) }
                .map { klass -> klass.objectInstance }
                .filterIsInstance()
                .associateBy { value -> value.name }

        @JvmStatic fun valueOf(value: String) = requireNotNull(map[value]) {
            "No enum constant ${State::class.java.name}.$value"
        }

        @JvmStatic fun values() = map.values.toTypedArray()
    }

    abstract class VanillaState(name: String, ordinal: Int) : State(name, ordinal)
    abstract class ChocolateState(name: String, ordinal: Int) : State(name, ordinal)

    object StateA : VanillaState("StateA", 0)
    object StateB : VanillaState("StateB", 1)
    object StateC : ChocolateState("StateC", 2)
}

This makes it so that you can call the following just like with any other Enum:

State.valueOf("StateB")
State.values()
enumValueOf("StateC")
enumValues()

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UPDATE

Extending Enum directly is no longer supported in Kotlin. See Disallow to explicitly extend Enum class : KT-7773.