MissingRuntimeRetention
Scoping and qualifier annotations must have runtime retention.

Alternate names: InjectScopeOrQualifierAnnotationRetention

The problem

Qualifier and Scope annotations are used by dependency injection frameworks to adjust their behavior. Not having runtime retention on scoping or qualifier annotations will cause unexpected behavior in frameworks that use reflection:

class CreditCardProcessor { @Inject CreditCardProcessor(...) }

@Qualifier
@interface ForTests

@Provides
@ForTests
CreditCardProcessor providesTestProcessor() { return new TestCreditCardProcessor(...) }
...

@Inject
MyApp(CreditCardProcessor processor) {
  processor.issueCharge(...); // Issues a charge against a fake!
}

Since the Qualifier doesn’t have runtime retention, the Guice provider method doesn’t see the annotation, and will use the TestCreditCardProcessor for the normal CreditCardProcessor injection point.

NOTE: Even for dependency injection frameworks traditionally considered to be compile-time dependent, the JSR-330 specification still requires runtime retention for both Qualifier and Scope.

Suppression

Suppress false positives by adding the suppression annotation @SuppressWarnings("MissingRuntimeRetention") to the enclosing element.