What problem are you trying to solve?

I’m working on a linter for detecting certain methods in our code base. The linting is based on method annotations. The annotation in question has a value attached which I need for making the linting decision. The method in question is only in the classpath, not part of the source files.

Dependency lib in the classpath:

@Target({ElementType.FIELD, ElementType.METHOD})
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface EssentialTracker {
  String value();
}

public class TestEssentialTracker {
 @EssentialTracker("aaa")
 public String getEssentialTracker() {
  return "test-essential-tracker";
 }
}

Source file input I'm linting:

String result = new TestEssentialTracker().getEssentialTracker();

In this case, I want to be able to access the value "aaa" in the recipe.

I did some experiments. It seems in the recipe I can access the annotation type but not the “value” because it was converted into JavaType.FullyQualified here without knowledge of the value: https://github.com/openrewrite/rewrite/blob/main/rewrite-java-17/src/main/java/org/openrewrite/java/isolated/ReloadableJava17TypeMapping.java#L696

Describe the solution you'd like

Preserve the annotation value pairs in the parsed LST.

Have you considered any alternatives or workarounds?

I don't think there is a workaround with OpenRewrite. I worked around in my solution by loading all classes and use reflection to inspect the actual annotation values, which is a bit cumbersome.

Additional context

n/a

Are you interested in contributing this feature to OpenRewrite?

Yes, here is the patch I worked on. I don't have good understanding of OpenRewrite implementation holistically though, would love your feedback.