@Retention(RUNTIME) @Target({METHOD,PARAMETER,FIELD}) public @interface Owning

Annotation indicating that ownership should be transferred to the annotated element for the purposes of Must Call checking. When written on a parameter, the annotation indicates that Must Call checking should be performed in the body of the method, not at call sites. When written on a method, the annotation indicates that return expressions do not need to be checked in the method body, but at call sites. When written on a field, the annotation indicates that fulfilling the must-call obligations of an instance of the class in which the field is declared also results in the annotated field's must-call obligations being satisfied. Static fields cannot be owning.

This annotation is a declaration annotation rather than a type annotation, because it does not logically belong to any type hierarchy. Logically, it is a directive to the Resource Leak Checker that informs it whether it is necessary to check that a value's must-call obligations have been satisfied. In that way, it can be viewed as an annotation expressing an aliasing relationship: passing a object with a non-empty must-call obligation to a method with an owning parameter resolves that object's must-call obligation, because the ownership annotation expresses that the object at the call site and the parameter in the method's body are aliases, and so checking only one of the two is required.

Methods are treated as if they have this annotation by default unless their method is annotated as NotOwning. Parameters and fields are treated as NotOwning by default.

When the -AnoLightweightOwnership command-line argument is passed to the checker, this annotation and NotOwning are ignored.

See the Checker Framework Manual:: Resource Leak Checker

Annotation Interface Owning