Annotations in Java and Kotlin¶

CodeQL databases of Java/Kotlin projects contain information about all annotations attached to program elements.

About working with annotations¶

Annotations are represented by these CodeQL classes:

The class Annotatable represents all entities that may have an annotation attached to them (that is, packages, reference types, fields, methods, and local variables).
The class AnnotationType represents a Java annotation type, such as java.lang.Override; annotation types are interfaces.
The class AnnotationElement represents an annotation element, that is, a member of an annotation type.
The class Annotation represents an annotation such as @Override; annotation values can be accessed through member predicate getValue.

For example, the Java/Kotlin standard library defines an annotation SuppressWarnings that instructs the compiler not to emit certain kinds of warnings:

package java.lang;

public @interface SuppressWarnings {
    String[] value;
}

SuppressWarnings is represented as an AnnotationType, with value as its only AnnotationElement.

A typical usage of SuppressWarnings would be this annotation for preventing a warning about using raw types:

class A {
    @SuppressWarnings("rawtypes")
    public A(java.util.List rawlist) {
    }
}

The expression @SuppressWarnings("rawtypes") is represented as an Annotation. The string literal "rawtypes" is used to initialize the annotation element value, and its value can be extracted from the annotation by means of the getValue predicate.

We could then write this query to find all @SuppressWarnings annotations attached to constructors, and return both the annotation itself and the value of its value element:

import java

from Constructor c, Annotation ann, AnnotationType anntp
where ann = c.getAnAnnotation() and
    anntp = ann.getType() and
    anntp.hasQualifiedName("java.lang", "SuppressWarnings")
select ann, ann.getValue("value")

If the codebase you are analyzing uses the @SuppressWarnings annotation, you can check the values of the annotation element returned by the query. They should use the "rawtypes" value described above.

As another example, this query finds all annotation types that only have a single annotation element, which has name value:

import java

from AnnotationType anntp
where forex(AnnotationElement elt |
    elt = anntp.getAnAnnotationElement() |
    elt.getName() = "value"
)
select anntp

Example: Finding missing `@Override` annotations¶

In newer versions of Java, it’s recommended (though not required) that you annotate methods that override another method with an @Override annotation. These annotations, which are checked by the compiler, serve as documentation, and also help you avoid accidental overloading where overriding was intended.

For example, consider this example program:

class Super {
    public void m() {}
}

class Sub1 extends Super {
    @Override public void m() {}
}

class Sub2 extends Super {
    public void m() {}
}

Here, both Sub1.m and Sub2.m override Super.m, but only Sub1.m is annotated with @Override.

We’ll now develop a query for finding methods like Sub2.m that should be annotated with @Override, but are not.

As a first step, let’s write a query that finds all @Override annotations. Annotations are expressions, so their type can be accessed using getType. Annotation types, on the other hand, are interfaces, so their qualified name can be queried using hasQualifiedName. Therefore we can implement the query like this:

import java

from Annotation ann
where ann.getType().hasQualifiedName("java.lang", "Override")
select ann

As always, it is a good idea to try this query on a CodeQL database for a Java/Kotlin project to make sure it actually produces some results. On the earlier example, it should find the annotation on Sub1.m. Next, we encapsulate the concept of an @Override annotation as a CodeQL class:

class OverrideAnnotation extends Annotation {
    OverrideAnnotation() {
        this.getType().hasQualifiedName("java.lang", "Override")
    }
}

This makes it very easy to write our query for finding methods that override another method, but don’t have an @Override annotation: we use predicate overrides to find out whether one method overrides another, and predicate getAnAnnotation (available on any Annotatable) to retrieve some annotation.

import java

from Method overriding, Method overridden
where overriding.overrides(overridden) and
    not overriding.getAnAnnotation() instanceof OverrideAnnotation
select overriding, "Method overrides another method, but does not have an @Override annotation."

In practice, this query may yield many results from compiled library code, which aren’t very interesting. It’s therefore a good idea to add another conjunct overriding.fromSource() to restrict the result to only report methods for which source code is available.

Example: Finding calls to deprecated methods¶

As another example, we can write a query that finds calls to methods marked with a @Deprecated annotation.

For example, consider this example program:

class A {
    @Deprecated void m() {}

    @Deprecated void n() {
        m();
    }

    void r() {
        m();
    }
}

Here, both A.m and A.n are marked as deprecated. Methods n and r both call m, but note that n itself is deprecated, so we probably should not warn about this call.

As in the previous example, we’ll start by defining a class for representing @Deprecated annotations:

class DeprecatedAnnotation extends Annotation {
    DeprecatedAnnotation() {
        this.getType().hasQualifiedName("java.lang", "Deprecated")
    }
}

Now we can define a class for representing deprecated methods:

class DeprecatedMethod extends Method {
    DeprecatedMethod() {
        this.getAnAnnotation() instanceof DeprecatedAnnotation
    }
}

Finally, we use these classes to find calls to deprecated methods, excluding calls that themselves appear in deprecated methods:

import java

from Call call
where call.getCallee() instanceof DeprecatedMethod
    and not call.getCaller() instanceof DeprecatedMethod
select call, "This call invokes a deprecated method."

In our example, this query flags the call to A.m in A.r, but not the one in A.n.

For more information about the class Call, see “Navigating the call graph.”

Improvements¶

The Java/Kotlin standard library provides another annotation type java.lang.SupressWarnings that can be used to suppress certain categories of warnings. In particular, it can be used to turn off warnings about calls to deprecated methods. Therefore, it makes sense to improve our query to ignore calls to deprecated methods from inside methods that are marked with @SuppressWarnings("deprecation").

For instance, consider this slightly updated example:

class A {
    @Deprecated void m() {}

    @Deprecated void n() {
        m();
    }

    @SuppressWarnings("deprecation")
    void r() {
        m();
    }
}

Here, the programmer has explicitly suppressed warnings about deprecated calls in A.r, so our query should not flag the call to A.m any more.

To do so, we first introduce a class for representing all @SuppressWarnings annotations where the string deprecation occurs among the list of warnings to suppress:

class SuppressDeprecationWarningAnnotation extends Annotation {
    SuppressDeprecationWarningAnnotation() {
        this.getType().hasQualifiedName("java.lang", "SuppressWarnings") and
        this.getAStringArrayValue("value").regexpMatch(".*deprecation.*")
    }
}

Here, we use getAStringArrayValue("value") to retrieve any of the suppressed warnings: @SuppressWarnings defines the warnings to suppress using the annotation element named value of type String[], and getAStringArrayValue retrieves all of the array values; the CodeQL class Annotation also has similar convenience predicates for the other possible annotation element types. Afterwards we check whether one of the values is the string deprecation using a regular expression match.

For real-world use, this check would have to be generalized a bit: for example, the OpenJDK Java compiler allows @SuppressWarnings("all") annotations to suppress all warnings. We may also want to make sure that deprecation is matched as an entire word, and not as part of another word, by changing the regular expression to ".*\\bdeprecation\\b.*".

Now we can extend our query to filter out calls in methods carrying a SuppressDeprecationWarningAnnotation:

import java

// Insert the class definitions from above

from Call call
where call.getCallee() instanceof DeprecatedMethod
    and not call.getCaller() instanceof DeprecatedMethod
    and not call.getCaller().getAnAnnotation() instanceof SuppressDeprecationWarningAnnotation
select call, "This call invokes a deprecated method."

It’s fairly common for projects to contain calls to methods that appear to be deprecated.

Annotations in Java and Kotlin¶

About working with annotations¶

Example: Finding missing @Override annotations¶

Example: Finding calls to deprecated methods¶

Improvements¶

Further reading¶

Example: Finding missing `@Override` annotations¶