Java: AnnotationElement does not extend Method

[Marcono1234]

AnnotationElement is in CodeQL effectively a Method (i.e. forall(AnnotationElement e | e instanceof Method) will always hold), however it does not extend Method.

This makes usage confusing because Java interfaces and classes can have (despite it being discouraged) an AnnotationType as supertype. So it is not obvious how CodeQL will handle this unless you look in the source and find out how AnnotationElement is defined.

Slightly related to #3708

[github-actions]

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[smowton]

Is this perhaps a deliberate choice because someone selecting any(Method m) might be surprised to come across these special synthetic methods?

[Marcono1234]

Is this perhaps a deliberate choice because someone selecting any(Method m) might be surprised to come across these special synthetic methods?

This is probably rather unlikely because as mentioned above the characteristics predicate of Method already matches AnnotationElement, so for example the following query has results:

import java

from AnnotationElement e
where e = any(Method m)
select e

Or do you mean something differently by "synthetic methods"?