Binding Library - Adding .aar file which should resolve resolution issue but still class is not found.

[TheHighriser]

Description

I am working on a binding library and I am looking into all my warnings because I have different runtime issues. So I thought it might be worth it to tackle warnings first. Even through at runtime it is not an issue but still I want to understand the "java-resolution-report.log".

This file is create at build time of the binding and as far as I understood it tells me any issues when resolving java dependencies.

It contains "Cycle 1" and "Cycle 2" which is already something I don't understand. Cycle 2 contains much less elements, still all of them are shown as warning in Visual Studio.

My problem now is that I can see something like this:

The method '[Method] com.blabla.ServerConfiguration getServerConfiguration()' was removed because the Java return type 'com.blabla.ServerConfiguration' could not be found.

Okay. Sounds reasonable. So I add the library to the build:

<AndroidLibrary Include="../libs/ServerConfigurationLibrary.aar" Manifest="../libs/ServerConfigurationLibrary.pom" Bind="false"/>

Still the error persists even through the .aar file contains the classes and files. So what do I not understand here?

Steps to Reproduce

No response

Link to public reproduction project repository

No response

Version with bug

9.0.14 SR1.4

Is this a regression from previous behavior?

No, this is something new

Last version that worked well

Unknown/Other

Affected platforms

Android

Affected platform versions

No response

Did you find any workaround?

No response

Relevant log output

[jonpryor]

java-resolution-report.log contains warnings from the binding process.

When you set %(Bind)=false, as you did with:

<AndroidLibrary
    Include="../libs/ServerConfigurationLibrary.aar"
    Manifest="../libs/ServerConfigurationLibrary.pom"
    Bind="false"
/>

you're telling the binding process to not bind ServerConfigurationLibrary.aar, which means types from ServerConfigurationLibrary.aar are still not visible to the binding process.

If you want the getServerConfiguration() to be bound, then you'll need to bind ServerConfigurationLibrary.aar as well. If you don't need getServerConfiguration() to be bound, or don't want to do the work to bind ServerConfigurationLibrary.aar, then feel free to ignore the warning(s).

[jpobst]

It contains "Cycle 1" and "Cycle 2" which is already something I don't understand. Cycle 2 contains much less elements, still all of them are shown as warning in Visual Studio.

There's some more detail in the PR description here: dotnet/java-interop#849.

Basically, the first cycle is the one you should focus on fixing. The additional cycles are elements removed because of the elements that got removed in the first cycle. Fixing the issues in cycle 1 should result in the additional cycles getting fixed.

There's also some additional documentation about fixing binding issues here:
https://github.com/dotnet/java-interop/wiki/Troubleshooting-Android-Bindings-Issues

[TheHighriser]

Thanks the PR documentation helps a lot. It says: "These are missing external Java types and generally indicate the user is missing a reference .jar or binding NuGet." - But my reference JAR is available, the class must be found?

In general Cycle 1 is huge. And Cycle 2 is basically empty besides one finding. Does that mean that the second Cycle resolved the other issues? Depending on the sentence above I would assume that actually adding the reference should not lead into this warning, but I see dozens of them.

[jpobst]

If the type referenced is really in the .aar then I would expect it to be found.

The only things I can think of are:

• The type isn't in the .aar, this can be verified with a Java decompiler like jd-gui
• The type isn't public

[jpobst]

Ah, I forgot that dependency checking only comes from managed bindings.

Thus you will need to set Bind=true (or just remove Bind=false) on ServerConfigurationLibrary.aar to create C# bindings for it.

Per the error message, we cannot generate this C# code:

public ServerConfiguration GetServerConfiguration () { ... }

if there isn't a C# ServerConfiguration class to return.

[TheHighriser]

Ok fine. Thanks for the input. As expected this is referring to bound code only. Understandable but still it is a bit misleading. The warning would indicate to me that something is missing but the binding is working perfectly fine, as those classes are available in java.

(So I thought in the first place those warnings are the origin of my problem with the binding library. But they are not after fixing now the real problem the binding is working perfectly fine although I have 100 of those warnings.)

EDIT: Made another mistake by duplicating my binding libs, as I had them in a internal folder which lead to the situation that they were added twice. I am fine now. Thanks for your help. Warnings are gone.