Is there a way to automatically call all the getter methods on an object graph?

Question

I have a collection of java bean objects and each object can have another collection of java bean objects (ie object graph). Is there an easy way to traverse the graph and call all the getter methods? Is there a library already doing something similar like that.

Answer 1

You can use reflection to do so manually.

Also take look at common-beanutils, there might be something to help.

Answer 2

Take a look at BeanInfo:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/beans/BeanInfo.html

and especially the getPropertyDescriptors() method.

Answer 3

java.beans.Introspector should allow you to traverse all the properties and methods of the beans.

Answer 4

I have been using a library called FEST for some automated testing and it has a reflection library that works well for me.

http://fest.easytesting.org/reflect/wiki/pmwiki.php