I'm attempting to slap two or more annotations of the same type on a single element, in this case, a method. Here's the approximate code that I'm working with:
public class Dupe {
public @interface Foo {
String bar();
}
@Foo(bar="one")
@Foo(bar="two")
public void haha() {}
}
When compiling the above, javac complains about a duplicate annotation:
max@upsight:~/work/daybreak$ javac Dupe.java Dupe.java:5: duplicate annotation
Is it simply not possible to repeat annotations like this? Pedantically speaking, aren't the two instances of @Foo above different due to their contents being different?
If the above isn't possible, what are some potential workarounds?
UPDATE: I've been asked to describe my use case. Here goes.
I'm building a syntax sugarish mechanism to "map" POJOs to document stores such as MongoDB. I want to allow indexes to be specified as annotations on the getters or setters. Here's a contrived example:
public class Employee {
private List<Project> projects;
@Index(expr = "project.client_id")
@Index(expr = "project.start_date")
public List<Project> getProjects() { return projects; }
}
Obviously, I want to be able to quickly find instances of Employee by various properties of Project. I can either specify @Index twice with different expr() values, or take the approach specified in the accepted answer. Even though Hibernate does this and it's not considered a hack, I think it still makes sense to at least allow having multiple annotations of the same type on a single element.
Two or more annotations of same type aren't allowed. However, you could do something like this:
public @interface Foos {
Foo[] value();
}
@Foos({@Foo(bar="one"), @Foo(bar="two")})
public void haha() {}
You'll need dedicated handling of Foos annotation in code though.
btw, I've just used this 2 hours ago to work around the same problem :)