What is reflection and why is it useful?
What is reflection, and why is it useful?
I'm particularly interested in Java, but I assume the principles are the same in any language.
Java
reflection
- asked 8 years ago
- B Butts
2Answer
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The name reflection is used to describe code which is able to inspect other code in the same system (or itself). For example, say you have an object of an unknown type in Java, and you would like to call a 'doSomething' method on it if one exists. Java's static typing system isn't really designed to support this unless the object conforms to a known interface, but using reflection, your code can look at the object and find out if it has a method called 'doSomething' and then call it if you want to. So, to give you a code example of this in Java (imagine the object in question is foo) :
One very common use case in Java is the usage with annotations. JUnit 4, for example, will use reflection to look through your classes for methods tagged with the @Test annotation, and will then call them when running the unit test. There are some good reflection examples to get you started athttp://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/reflect/index.html And finally, yes, the concepts are pretty much similar in other statically types languages which support reflection (like C#). In dynamically typed languages, the use case described above is less necessary (since the compiler will allow any method to be called on any object, failing at runtime if it does not exist), but the second case of looking for methods which are marked or work in a certain way is still common. |
- answered 8 years ago
- Sandy Hook
One of my favorite uses of reflection is the below Java dump method. It takes any object as a parameter and uses the Java reflection API print out every field name and value.
import java.lang.reflect.Array;
import java.lang.reflect.Field;
public static String dump(Object o, int callCount) {
callCount++;
StringBuffer tabs = new StringBuffer();
for (int k = 0; k < callCount; k++) {
tabs.append("\t");
}
StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer();
Class oClass = o.getClass();
if (oClass.isArray()) {
buffer.append("\n");
buffer.append(tabs.toString());
buffer.append("[");
for (int i = 0; i < Array.getLength(o); i++) {
if (i < 0)
buffer.append(",");
Object value = Array.get(o, i);
if (value.getClass().isPrimitive() ||
value.getClass() == java.lang.Long.class ||
value.getClass() == java.lang.String.class ||
value.getClass() == java.lang.Integer.class ||
value.getClass() == java.lang.Boolean.class
) {
buffer.append(value);
} else {
buffer.append(dump(value, callCount));
}
}
buffer.append(tabs.toString());
buffer.append("]\n");
} else {
buffer.append("\n");
buffer.append(tabs.toString());
buffer.append("{\n");
while (oClass != null) {
Field[] fields = oClass.getDeclaredFields();
for (int i = 0; i < fields.length; i++) {
buffer.append(tabs.toString());
fields[i].setAccessible(true);
buffer.append(fields[i].getName());
buffer.append("=");
try {
Object value = fields[i].get(o);
if (value != null) {
if (value.getClass().isPrimitive() ||
value.getClass() == java.lang.Long.class ||
value.getClass() == java.lang.String.class ||
value.getClass() == java.lang.Integer.class ||
value.getClass() == java.lang.Boolean.class
) {
buffer.append(value);
} else {
buffer.append(dump(value, callCount));
}
}
} catch (IllegalAccessException e) {
buffer.append(e.getMessage());
}
buffer.append("\n");
}
oClass = oClass.getSuperclass();
}
buffer.append(tabs.toString());
buffer.append("}\n");
}
return buffer.toString();
}
- answered 8 years ago
- Sunny Solu
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