I was writing a toString() for a class in Java the other day by manually writing out each element of the class to a String and it occurred to me that using reflection it might be possible to create a generic toString() method that could work on ALL classes. I.E. it would figure out the field names and values and send them out to a String.
Getting the field names is fairly simple, here is what a co-worker came up with:
public static List initFieldArray(String className) throws ClassNotFoundException {
Class c = Class.forName(className);
Field field[] = c.getFields();
List<String> classFields = new ArrayList(field.length);
for (int i = 0; i < field.length; i++) {
String cf = field[i].toString();
classFields.add(cf.substring(cf.lastIndexOf(".") + 1));
}
return classFields;
}
Using a factory I could reduce the performance overhead by storing the fields once, the first time the toString() is called. However finding the values could be a lot more expensive.
Due to the performance of reflection this may be more hypothetical then practical. But I am interested in the idea of reflection and how I can use it to improve my everyday programming.
Apache commons-lang ReflectionToStringBuilder does this for you.
import org.apache.commons.lang3.builder.ReflectionToStringBuilder
// your code goes here
public String toString() {
return ReflectionToStringBuilder.toString(this);
}
Another option, if you are ok with JSON, is Google's GSON library.
public String toString() {
return new GsonBuilder().setPrettyPrinting().create().toJson(this);
}
It's going to do the reflection for you. This produces a nice, easy to read JSON file. Easy-to-read being relative, non tech folks might find the JSON intimidating.
You could make the GSONBuilder a member variable too, if you don't want to new it up every time.
If you have data that can't be printed (like a stream) or data you just don't want to print, you can just add @Expose tags to the attributes you want to print and then use the following line.
new GsonBuilder()
.setPrettyPrinting()
.excludeFieldsWithoutExposeAnnotation()
.create()
.toJson(this);
W/reflection, as I hadn't been aware of the apache library:
(be aware that if you do this you'll probably need to deal with subobjects and make sure they print properly - in particular, arrays won't show you anything useful)
@Override
public String toString()
{
StringBuilder b = new StringBuilder("[");
for (Field f : getClass().getFields())
{
if (!isStaticField(f))
{
try
{
b.append(f.getName() + "=" + f.get(this) + " ");
} catch (IllegalAccessException e)
{
// pass, don't print
}
}
}
b.append(']');
return b.toString();
}
private boolean isStaticField(Field f)
{
return Modifier.isStatic(f.getModifiers());
}
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