How To: Use reflection to create instance of generic type?

Question

I would like to be able to use reflection to instantiate an instance of a generic type, but can't seem to avoid getting type safety warnings from the compiler. (I'm using Eclipse 3.1.1) Here is a trivial example: suppose I want to create an instance of a list of strings using reflection.
My first guess was to write the following:
Class cls = Class.forName("java.util.ArrayList<String>");
List<String> myList = cls.newInstance();The call to Class.forName throws a ClassNotFoundException. OK, fine, so I tried this:
Class cls = Class.forName("java.util.ArrayList");
List<String> myList = cls.newInstance();Now the second line generates the warning "Type safety: The expression of type List needs unchecked conversion to conform to List<String>".
If I change the second line to
List<String> myList = (List<String>)cls.newInstance();then I get the compiler warning "Type safety: The cast from Object to List<String> is actually checking against the erased type List".
This is a trivial example that illustrates my problem. What I am trying to do is to persist type-safe lists to an XML file, and then read them back in from XML into type-safe lists. When reading them back in, I don't know the type of the elements in the list until run time, so I need to use reflection to create an instance of a type-safe list.
Is this erasure business prohibiting me from doing this? Or does the reflection API provide a way for me to specify at run time the type of the elements in the list? If so, I don't see it. Is my only recourse to simply ignore the type safety warnings?

Answer 1

Harald,
I appreciate all your help on this topic. I think we are close to putting this thing to rest, but I'd like to run one more thing by you.
I tried something similar to your suggestion:public static <T> List<T> loadFromStorage(Class<T> clazz) {
    List<T> list = new ArrayList<T>();
    for ( ...whatever ...) {
       T obj = clazz.newInstance();
       // code to load from storage ...
       list.add(obj);
    return list;
}And everything is fine except for one small gotcha. The argument to this method is a Class<T>, and what I read from my XML storage is the fully qualified name of my class(es). As you pointed out earlier, the Class.forName("Foo") method will return a Class<?> rather than a Class<Foo>. Therefore, I am still getting a compiler warning when attempting to produce the argument to pass to the loadFromStorage method.
I was able to get around this problem and eliminate the compiler warning, but I'm not sure I like the way I did it. All of my persistent classes extend a common base class. So, I added a static Map to my base class:class Base
   private static Map<String, Class<? extends Base>> classMap = null;
   static
      Map<String, Class<? extends Base>> map = new TreeMap<String, Class<? extends Base>>();
      classMap = Collections.synchronizedMap(map);
   public static Class<? extends Base> getClass(String name)
      return classMap.get(name);
   protected static void putClass(Class<? extends Base> cls)
      classMap.put(cls.getName(), cls);
}And added a static initializer to each of my persistent classes:class Foo extends Base
   static
      Base.putClass(Foo.class);
}So now my persistence code can replace Class.forName("my.package.Foo") with Base.getClass("my.package.Foo"). Since Foo.class is of type Class<Foo>, this will give me the Class<Foo> I want instead of a Class<?>.
Basically, it works and I have no compiler warnings, but it is unfortunate that I had to come up with my own mechanism to obtain a Class<Foo> object when my starting point was the string "my.package.Foo". I think that the JDK, in order to fully support reflection with generic types, should provide a standard API for doing this. I should not have to invent my own.
Maybe it is there and I'm just not seeing it. Do you know of another way, using reflection, to get from a string "my.package.Foo" to a Class<Foo> object?
Thanks again for your help,
Gary