Why a public constructor is not accessible via reflection

Question

I'm confused, when executing following code:

@Test
public void testAccessible() throws NoSuchMethodException {
    Constructor<LinkedList> constructor = LinkedList.class.getConstructor();
    Assert.assertTrue(constructor.isAccessible());
}

the assertion fails, but LinkedList class has public default constructor. So why isAccessible() returns false?

Answer 1

You could use getModifiers() method to determine accessibility/modifiers, isAccessible() exists for different purpose.

Go through documentation for Modifiers class in java. [ Link] It has methods necessary to determine visibility of a class member.

isAccessible allows reflection API to access any member at runtime. By calling Field.setAcessible(true) you turn off the access checks for this particular Field instance, for reflection only. Now you can access it even if it is private, protected or package scope, even if the caller is not part of those scopes. You still can't access the field using normal code. The compiler won't allow it.

Answer 2

From the Java Docs...

A value of false indicates that the reflected object should enforce Java language access checks

isAccessible has more to do with Java's security manager then it does with it's public visibility

Class#getConstructor(Class...) and Class#getConstructors both return only the public constructors