Java toString() using reflection?

Question

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 mig

Answer 1

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);