Defining an attribute-class for an array of objects

Posted on September 30, 2010 Updated on September 30, 2010

When defining the attributes for an ADF Faces af:pageTemplate or af:declarativeComponent inside of an af:xmlContent, you need to provide an attribute-class definition. This looks something like:

<attribute-class>java.lang.String</attribute-class>

but what if you needed an array of Strings? That has a bit stranger syntax:

<attribute-class>[[Ljava.lang.String;</attribute-class>

Why is this not just “java.lang.String[]”? These attribute-class entries are the result of calling Class.forName.  The Class.forName on an array of objects looks like “[[Lsome.package.SomeClass;”.