Can Java Annotations help me with this?

Question

I\'m wondering if there is a way to specify that a method gets called in advance of a class method. I know something like this should be posssible, since JUnit has before(),

Answer 1

Why are you doing this? Are you attempting to avoid having a constructor with many arguments (using setters then calling init) or are you avoiding having many constructors that all have similar arguments? If this is the case, you can use a builder pattern.

public class Foo {
int a, b, c, d, e;
Foo(int a, int b, int c, int d, int e) { this.a=a; /*etc*/ }
}

public class FooBuilder {
int a,b,c,d,e;
FooBuilder A(int a) { this.a=a; return this;}
FooBuilder B(int b) { this.b=b; return this;}
//etc
Foo create(){ return new Foo(a,b,c,d,e);
}

If this doesn't work, I'd suggest looking into AOP. I'd mark the methods that must have init() called already with an annotation [perhaps @requires('init') or the like] and make you AOP framework insert the proper code. Be careful that multiple init's either don't have side effects or that you do proper synchronization on your has_init_been_called state.