Annotation
The programming language dart has the ability to annotate different elements like classes, functions, parameters and more. Like other programming languages, annotations are used to provide additional information about the element.
DartPoet has the ability to create annotations which can be applied on many spec objects from the project. Beware Dart and Kotlin are not interoperable. The usage of the predefined annotations from Kotlin or the jdk from Java is not recommended. If you use them, you need to specify the annotations in your Dart project.
Creating annotations
To creation of an annotation works over the AnnotationSpecBuilder which can be accessed over the AnnotationSpec companion object.
The following snippet shows the creation of an annotation:
Which generates the following annotation:
If you wish to add additional meta information to an annotation, you have the ability to add them over the content methods.
Which generates the following annotation:
Predefined annotations
The documentation from Dart points out that it has some predefined annotations. To increase the usability of DartPoet they are defined as constants variables. For more information about them, please visit the Dart documentation.
The name definition of the constants are the following:
When you use the deprecated annotation, you need to know your exact use case. Dart contains two annotations to tell that the function is deprecated. The first one is @deprecated and the second one is @Deprecated('message'). If you decide to use the annotation which allows a message, you need to create it over the AnnotationSpec.builder. DartPoet provides only a constant for the @deprecated annotation without a message.