Adding new method to a class through reflection [duplicate]

Question

Is it possible to add a method to a class through reflection in java??

public class BaseDomain {

    public BaseDomain(){
        Field[] fields = this.getClass().getDeclaredFields();
        for(int i=0; i<fields.length; i++){
            String field = fields[i].toString();

            String setterMethod = "public void set" + field.toLowerCase();

            //Now I want to add this method to this class.

        }
    }
}

Answer 1

No, not through reflection.

Reflection asks about classes and their members, you can change fields but you cannot create new ones. You cannot add new methods.

You can use a a bytecode manipulation library to add methods to classes; but why would you want to?

You can't call the methods anyway except via reflection as they would obviously not exist at compile time.

Maybe take a look at project Lombok - this is a annotation preprocessor that can add methods to classes at compile time. It will add getters and setters automagically as long as your classes are correctly annotated.