Question

Ok, so I am setting up my own XML serialization (I know there are others out there, even some built in to Java, but I am doing it myself to learn and because it is so awesome to work with). I have serialization down. I am currently on the deserialization (reading in the XML file and assembling objects based on the data in the file) and I am running into problems with setting generic types. After extensive research, I figured out how to get the generic types of a class so I could write them when serializing, but I have no clue how to do this:

Class c = Class.forName(string);
ArrayList<c> list = new ArrayList<c>();

I have seen a few answers for this in C#, but obviously C# is a bit more versatile than Java, and there is no way that I can replicate the solutions there in Java. Can this even be done, even with reflection?

Answer 1

You can’t.

Generics in Java are simply compile-time syntactic sugar. It makes it so you don’t have to cast everything to and from Object like we did in the old days when dinosaurs roamed the JVM, and gives you some compile-time type checking.

Edit to add: There is some metadata preserved at runtime that you can get at via reflection to inspect a generic class, but nothing like what you want.