# External annotations for JDK

**URL:** <https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/external-annotations-for-jdk/1026>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Created:** [November 15, 2012, 1:21pm UTC](https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/external-annotations-for-jdk/1026 "2012-11-15T13:21:09Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![komu](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/discuss.kotlinlang.org/komu/32/1602_2.png) [@komu](https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/u/komu)\
**Post date:** [November 15, 2012, 1:21pm UTC](https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/external-annotations-for-jdk/1026/1 "2012-11-15T13:21:09Z")

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I ported a few thousand lines of code to Kotlin as an experiment and during that I had to to add quite a few external annotations to various JDK-methods. That in itself was easy enough, but the problem is that while I could add the annotations to version control I couldn't get find a way to configure the annotations at the project level. Instead I had to add a custom JDK-configuration to IDEA, configure annotations for that and document in the README-file of my project how to setup this so that other developers get the annotations as well. Am I missing something or is this the best way to go?

Actually at first I didn’t even realize that the annotations are global: it was only when I started a second larger Kotlin-project that I noticed that it was placing its annotations in the source tree of the first project. So I guess that this is something that could really trip people over. The situation is quite ironic, since currently third-party libraries are actually easier to use with Kotlin than JDK.

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**Author:** ![komu](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/discuss.kotlinlang.org/komu/32/1602_2.png) [@komu](https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/u/komu)\
**Post date:** [November 15, 2012, 1:25pm UTC](https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/external-annotations-for-jdk/1026/2 "2012-11-15T13:25:49Z")

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Seems that there's already an issue [IDEA-78559](http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-78559), which is related to this. While sharing external annotations between team members is something that I've wished I could do when writing Java, it's even more important in Kotlin because the code won't even compile without the annotations. Are there any plans to implement this?