Gradle Reflections Plugin

This plugin uses Reflections to scan and index your project classes at build-time, allowing run-time querying without the indexing performance hit.

• History
• Usage
  • Gradle
  • Java

History

This plugin is a revival of the gradle-reflections-plugin by manosbatsis - consider this a rewrite / modernization.

I wanted to use the plugin in a project, but it wasn't compatible with reflections 0.10.2, so I forked it and made the necessary changes. I hope this rewrite will keep you from debugging for hours to find out the version incompability like I had to.

Most of the codebase is taken from the original plugin, full credit goes to Manos Batsis for that.

Changes I made:

• Update to Gradle 8
• Update to Reflections 0.10.2
• Java 8+ compability
• Switch to kotlin dsl
• Rewrite gradle buildscript
• Replace lombok with manual getters and setters

Usage

The idea is to use the plugin with Gradle to embed a pre-scanned metadata index in your jar, then utilise the embedded index at runtime using Reflections.collect(). This can improve the performance of Reflections as it avoids re-scanning the classpath at runtime.

Gradle

The plugin is published on the Gradle plugin portal, so it is easy to integrate it in your project.

This will add the pre-scanned metadata index in your jar as META-INF/reflections/PROJECTNAME-reflections.xml, with PROJECTNAME substituted by your actual project name.

Groovy

plugins {
	id "io.github.simulatan.gradle-reflections-plugin" version "2.0.0"
}

classes {
    finalizedBy reflections
}

repositories {
	mavenCentral()
}

dependencies {
	implementation 'org.reflections:reflections:0.10.2'
	implementation 'dom4j:dom4j:2.1.4'
}

Kotlin

plugins {
    id("io.github.simulatan.gradle-reflections-plugin") version "2.0.0"
}

tasks.classes {
    finalizedBy("reflections")
}

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}

dependencies {
    implementation("org.reflections:reflections:0.10.2")
    implementation("dom4j:dom4j:2.1.4")
}

Your code

To utilise the pre-scanned index simply create a Reflections instance like this:

Java

// Collect and merge pre-scanned Reflection xml resources
// and merge them into a Reflections instance
Reflections reflections = Reflections.collect();
// use the instance, e.g.
reflections.getSubTypesOf(FooBar.class);

Kotlin

// Collect and merge pre-scanned Reflection xml resources
// and merge them into a Reflections instance
val reflections = Reflections.collect()
// use the instance, e.g.
reflections.getSubTypesOf(FooBar::class.java)