An Approach for Code Annotation Validation with Metadata Location Transparency

The use of metadata in software development, specially by code annotations, has emerged to complement some limitations of object-oriented programming. A recent study revealed that a lack of validation on the configured metadata can lead to bugs hard to identify and correct. There are approaches to optimize metadata configuration that add the annotation out of the target code element, such as its definition on the enclosing code element or indirectly inside other annotations. Annotation validation rules that rely on the presence of other annotations are specially hard to perform when it is possible to configure it out of the target element. Available approaches for annotation validation in the literature consider their presence only in the target element. This paper presents a validation of code annotations approach in object-oriented software with location transparency, whereas definitions can occur in different parts of source code related to the target element. An evaluation with a meta-framework supports our hypothesis that the approach is capable of decoupling the annotation location from the validation rules.