Weirdest java issue I've encountered, NoClassDefFoundError due to an Annotation?

Question

I think I hit something rough... let me know your thoughts.

I've been developing for while now an infra project for Android which uses Annotations , which I use to define a couple of things.

Take a look at the following annotation, it should compile, and it does, but when I run it on the device, I get a NoClassDefFoundException.

@Target({FIELD})
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface ViewIdentifier {

    int viewId() default -1;

    int[] viewIds() default {};

    ViewUI_Action[] listeners() default {};

    boolean forDev() default false;

}

This is THE implementation:

@SuppressWarnings("unused")
@ViewIdentifier(
        listeners = ViewUI_Action.OnClickAsCollection,
        viewIds = {R.id.AccelerometerEngineeringScreen, R.id.RotationVectorEngineeringScreen, R.id.NetworkEngineeringScreen,
                R.id.MagneticEngineeringScreen, R.id.OrientationEngineeringScreen, R.id.GPS_EngineeringScreen, R.id.CallsEngineeringScreen,
                R.id.UpgradeAppButton, R.id.DEV_Action_Button, R.id.FYI_Button})
private View[] modelViews; 

If I remove the ViewIdentifier Annotation, the code compiles, and runs fine, the app starts, but if I return the annotation, the NoClassDefFoundError persists.

This is NOT a clean build issue, I've been very careful before posting this, plus, The missing class file is in the bin/classes, and it does work regardless of clean build when I remove the annotation. I've tried refreshing the workspace rebuilding it, close-open project, restart Eclipse, and other tricks.

The weirdest thing is that if I reverse the parameter of the annotation eg.

@SuppressWarnings("unused")
@ViewIdentifier(
        viewIds = {R.id.AccelerometerEngineeringScreen, R.id.RotationVectorEngineeringScreen, R.id.NetworkEngineeringScreen,
                R.id.MagneticEngineeringScreen, R.id.OrientationEngineeringScreen, R.id.GPS_EngineeringScreen, R.id.CallsEngineeringScreen,
                R.id.UpgradeAppButton, R.id.DEV_Action_Button, R.id.FYI_Button},
        listeners = ViewUI_Action.OnClickAsCollection)
private View[] modelViews; 

I get an Eclipse error saying:

And Eclipse cannot locate the class containing this field.

So what do you think? Error compiling the class?

Adam.

Answer 1

It seems like the listeners field have array initializer syntax even for an array of size one.

Hope that helps :-)