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20040416 Friday April 16, 2004

Dumping Java object contents If you've ever exploited Perl's Data::Dumper to inspect a Perl object, you know how useful it can be. For Java programmers, the reflection API provides tools to perform a similar interogation but the API has long lacked a higher level tool. The Jakarta commons-lang jar has a goodie to help.

I first ran across the ToStringBuilder class looking for a tool to standardise the formatting of toString() -- it's annoying to trace a set of objects' contents to a log file and find that they all implement toString() with different levels of completeness or with different formatting conventions. Well, this class has another little gem in one of it's static methods. Check this out:
  System.out.println("An object: " + ToStringBuilder.reflectionToString(anObject));
      <Emeril Lagasse>BAM!</Emeril Lagasse>
That's it.

By providing a higher-level wrapper API, ToStringBuilder makes using reflection to dump a Java object contents a little bit easier. Of course, seeing as how I started off talking about Perl, it's worth a mention that TMTOWDI'ness presents itself in this case. The Java bean API's XMLEncoder can be used to serialize a Java object to XML. ( Apr 16 2004, 10:59:39 PM PDT ) Permalink
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