Java: cannot access annotations through reflection

Question

Here is a test class:

import java.lang.annotation.Annotation;
import java.lang.reflect.Method;

public class TestAnnotations {

    @interface Annotate{}

           


        

Answer 1

In order to access an annotation at runtime, it needs to have a Retention policy of Runtime.

@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME) @interface Annotate {}

Otherwise, the annotations are dropped and the JVM is not aware of them.
For more information, see here.