How to access Collection Generic Type class

Question

I have a class like this :

public class SubClass <T> extends SuperClass<Collection<T>>{
   public Class<T> getInner() {
      // What goes here?
   }
}

Where SuperClass is simply a generic class. My question is how to gain access to a Class object in order to return it? I can't seem to be able to do this because of Type erasure.

Any help?

Answer 1

Exactly, type erasure means you have to do it explicitly.

Basically you need SubClass to take a Class<T> as a parameter in the constructor, and then hang onto it. You can still end up with type erasure issues there though, if T is actually meant to be (say) List<String>. See Neal Gafter's blog for more info on this and a workaround, and the Guice 2.0 TypeLiteral class for an implementation.