How do you find all subclasses of a given class in Java?

Scanning for classes is not easy with pure Java.

The spring framework offers a class called ClassPathScanningCandidateComponentProvider that can do what you need. The following example would find all subclasses of MyClass in the package org.example.package

ClassPathScanningCandidateComponentProvider provider = new ClassPathScanningCandidateComponentProvider(false);
provider.addIncludeFilter(new AssignableTypeFilter(MyClass.class));

// scan in org.example.package
Set<BeanDefinition> components = provider.findCandidateComponents("org/example/package");
for (BeanDefinition component : components)
{
    Class cls = Class.forName(component.getBeanClassName());
    // use class cls found
}

This method has the additional benefit of using a bytecode analyzer to find the candidates which means it will not load all classes it scans.

There is no other way to do it other than what you described. Think about it - how can anyone know what classes extend ClassX without scanning each class on the classpath?

Eclipse can only tell you about the super and subclasses in what seems to be an "efficient" amount of time because it already has all of the type data loaded at the point where you press the "Display in Type Hierarchy" button (since it is constantly compiling your classes, knows about everything on the classpath, etc).

This is not possible to do using only the built-in Java Reflections API.

A project exists that does the necessary scanning and indexing of your classpath so you can get access this information...

Reflections

A Java runtime metadata analysis, in the spirit of Scannotations

Reflections scans your classpath, indexes the metadata, allows you to query it on runtime and may save and collect that information for many modules within your project.

Using Reflections you can query your metadata for:

• get all subtypes of some type
• get all types annotated with some annotation
• get all types annotated with some annotation, including annotation parameters matching
• get all methods annotated with some

(disclaimer: I have not used it, but the project's description seems to be an exact fit for your needs.)

Don't forget that the generated Javadoc for a class will include a list of known subclasses (and for interfaces, known implementing classes).

It should be noted as well that this will of course only find all those subclasses that exist on your current classpath. Presumably this is OK for what you are currently looking at, and chances are you did consider this, but if you have at any point released a non-final class into the wild (for varying levels of "wild") then it is entirely feasible that someone else has written their own subclass that you will not know about.

Thus if you happened to be wanting to see all subclasses because you want to make a change and are going to see how it affects subclasses' behaviour - then bear in mind the subclasses that you can't see. Ideally all of your non-private methods, and the class itself should be well-documented; make changes according to this documentation without changing the semantics of methods/non-private fields and your changes should be backwards-compatible, for any subclass that followed your definition of the superclass at least.

The reason you see a difference between your implementation and Eclipse is because you scan each time, while Eclipse (and other tools) scan only once (during project load most of the times) and create an index. Next time you ask for the data it doesn't scan again, but look at the index.

You can use org.reflections library and then, create an object of Reflections class. Using this object, you can get list of all subclasses of given class. https://www.javadoc.io/doc/org.reflections/reflections/0.9.10/org/reflections/Reflections.html

    Reflections reflections = new Reflections("my.project.prefix");
    System.out.println(reflections.getSubTypesOf(A.class)));

I needed to do this as a test case, to see if new classes had been added to the code. This is what I did

final static File rootFolder = new File(SuperClass.class.getProtectionDomain().getCodeSource().getLocation().getPath());
private static ArrayList<String> files = new ArrayList<String>();
listFilesForFolder(rootFolder); 

@Test(timeout = 1000)
public void testNumberOfSubclasses(){
    ArrayList<String> listSubclasses = new ArrayList<>(files);
    listSubclasses.removeIf(s -> !s.contains("Superclass.class"));
    for(String subclass : listSubclasses){
        System.out.println(subclass);
    }
    assertTrue("You did not create a new subclass!", listSubclasses.size() >1);     
}

public static void listFilesForFolder(final File folder) {
    for (final File fileEntry : folder.listFiles()) {
        if (fileEntry.isDirectory()) {
            listFilesForFolder(fileEntry);
        } else {
            files.add(fileEntry.getName().toString());
        }
    }
}

If you intend to load all subclassess of given class which are in the same package, you can do so:

public static List<Class> loadAllSubClasses(Class pClazz) throws IOException, ClassNotFoundException {
    ClassLoader classLoader = pClazz.getClassLoader();
    assert classLoader != null;
    String packageName = pClazz.getPackage().getName();
    String dirPath = packageName.replace(".", "/");
    Enumeration<URL> srcList = classLoader.getResources(dirPath);

    List<Class> subClassList = new ArrayList<>();
    while (srcList.hasMoreElements()) {
        File dirFile = new File(srcList.nextElement().getFile());
        File[] files = dirFile.listFiles();
        if (files != null) {
            for (File file : files) {
                String subClassName = packageName + '.' + file.getName().substring(0, file.getName().length() - 6);
                if (! subClassName.equals(pClazz.getName())) {
                    subClassList.add(Class.forName(subClassName));
                }
            }
        }
    }

    return subClassList;
}

find all classes in classpath

public static List<String> getClasses() {
        URLClassLoader urlClassLoader = (URLClassLoader) Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader();
        List<String> classes = new ArrayList<>();
        for (URL url : urlClassLoader.getURLs()) {
            try {
                if (url.toURI().getScheme().equals("file")) {
                    File file = new File(url.toURI());
                    if (file.exists()) {
                        try {
                            if (file.isDirectory()) {
                                for (File listFile : FileUtils.listFiles(file, new String[]{"class"}, true)) {
                                    String classFile = listFile.getAbsolutePath().replace(file.getAbsolutePath(), "").replace(".class", "");
                                    if (classFile.startsWith(File.separator)) {
                                        classFile = classFile.substring(1);
                                    }
                                    classes.add(classFile.replace(File.separator, "."));
                                }
                            } else {
                                JarFile jarFile = new JarFile(file);
                                if (url.getFile().endsWith(".jar")) {
                                    Enumeration<JarEntry> entries = jarFile.entries();
                                    while (entries.hasMoreElements()) {
                                        JarEntry jarEntry = entries.nextElement();
                                        if (jarEntry.getName().endsWith(".class")) {
                                            classes.add(jarEntry.getName().replace(".class", "").replace("/", "."));
                                        }
                                    }
                                }
                            }
                        } catch (IOException e) {
                            e.printStackTrace();
                        }
                    }
                }
            } catch (URISyntaxException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
        return classes;
    }