java list all the child classes of a parent
inheritance, java, reflection
Solution
I would use http://code.google.com/p/reflections/
Using Reflections you can query your metadata such as:
- get all subtypes of some type
- get all types/methods/fields annotated with some annotation, w/o annotation parameters matching
- get all resources matching matching a regular expression
This can be used in an indexed or cached mode. As @Jagger suggests, a brute force search of every class is relatively slow. You can also limit the search by package e.g. `com.mycom.*`
Problem
Possible Duplicate: At runtime, find all classes in a Java application that extend a base class I need to get list of all the classes (child) which extends a particular class (parent) and then create an instance of them all. how should I do this in Java?