Class Introspector

For each of those three kinds of information, the Introspector will separately analyze the bean's class and superclasses looking for either explicit or implicit information and use that information to build a BeanInfo object that comprehensively describes the target bean.

For each class "Foo", explicit information may be available if there exists a corresponding "FooBeanInfo" class that provides a non-null value when queried for the information. We first look for the BeanInfo class by taking the full package-qualified name of the target bean class and appending "BeanInfo" to form a new class name. If this fails, then we take the final classname component of this name, and look for that class in each of the packages specified in the BeanInfo package search path.

Thus for a class such as "sun.xyz.OurButton" we would first look for a BeanInfo class called "sun.xyz.OurButtonBeanInfo" and if that failed we'd look in each package in the BeanInfo search path for an OurButtonBeanInfo class. With the default search path, this would mean looking for "sun.beans.infos.OurButtonBeanInfo".

If a class provides explicit BeanInfo about itself then we add that to the BeanInfo information we obtained from analyzing any derived classes, but we regard the explicit information as being definitive for the current class and its base classes, and do not proceed any further up the superclass chain.

If we don't find explicit BeanInfo on a class, we use low-level reflection to study the methods of the class and apply standard design patterns to identify property accessors, event sources, or public methods. We then proceed to analyze the class's superclass and add in the information from it (and possibly on up the superclass chain).

For more information about introspection and design patterns, please consult the JavaBeans specification.