The “Break it Down” Blog

If you are a Java developer and use the new @SuppressWarnings annotation in your code from time-to-time to suppress compiler warnings you, like me, have wondered probably about a million times already just exactly what are the supported values that can be used with this annotation.

The reason the list isn’t easy to find is because it’s compiler specific, which means Sun may have a different set of supported values than say IBM, GCJ or Apache Harmony.

Fortunately for us, the Eclipse folks have documented the values they support (As of Eclipse 3.3), here they are for reference:

• all to suppress all warnings
• boxing to suppress warnings relative to boxing/unboxing operations
• cast to suppress warnings relative to cast operations
• dep-ann to suppress warnings relative to deprecated annotation
• deprecation to suppress warnings relative to deprecation
• fallthrough to suppress warnings relative to missing breaks in switch statements
• finally to suppress warnings relative to finally block that don’t return
• hiding to suppress warnings relative to locals that hide variable
• incomplete-switch to suppress warnings relative to missing entries in a switch statement (enum case)
• nls to suppress warnings relative to non-nls string literals
• null to suppress warnings relative to null analysis
• restriction to suppress warnings relative to usage of discouraged or forbidden references
• serial to suppress warnings relative to missing serialVersionUID field for a serializable class
• static-access to suppress warnings relative to incorrect static access
• synthetic-access to suppress warnings relative to unoptimized access from inner classes
• unchecked to suppress warnings relative to unchecked operations
• unqualified-field-access to suppress warnings relative to field access unqualified
• unused to suppress warnings relative to unused code

TIP: For the folks that haven’t used @SuppressWarnings before, the syntax looks like this:

@SuppressWarnings(”unused”)

and can be placed above almost any piece of code that is causing a compiler warning to popup for your class.