java annotation enum array default value

Question

I want to write an annotation that hast a EnumArray Field. Default value should be all values of the Enum. This code works but I don't want to specify every enum manually.

@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Target(ElementType.TYPE)
public @interface CommonScope
{
    ECountry[] countries() default {ECountry.AT, ECountry.DE};

}

I want to do something like this:

ECountry[] countries() default ECountry.values();

Can someone tell me how to achieve this?

Thank you

Answer 1

This is not possible, annotation declaration is very limited. You can not call any methods or use properties, you can only use compile time constant expressions , that are known at compile time by the compiler.

As a workaround, you could add a special enum value like Countries.ALL_COUNTRIES if that makes sense for your application.