Question

I am writing a deserializer method, which looks like so:

public <T> T deserialize(Object[] result, String[] fields, Class<T> type);

So basically I will be passed in a result array of data which is all objects, and a class type T which I need to convert the data in the array to the types in the given class, and create a new class of type T and return it. The String[] fields is the field names corresponding to the data in Object[] result. The field names will correspond to the Class T.

The casting will need to use reflection of the given class to find out the type of each field.

eg.

result = ["Mike", "London", 28];
fields = ["name", "location", "age" ];

Class T =

public class GivenClass{

  private String name;
  private String location;
  private Integer age;

  public GivenClass(String name, String location, Integer age){
    this.name = name;
    this.location = location;
    this.age = age;
  }
}

Answer 1

Class implementation

static class GivenClass {

    private String name;
    private String location;
    private Integer age;

    public GivenClass(String name, String location, Integer age) {
        this.name = name;
        this.location = location;
        this.age = age;
    }

    public GivenClass(Map<String, Object> data) throws Exception {
        for (Field f : GivenClass.class.getDeclaredFields())
            f.set(this, data.get(f.getName()));
    }

    public Map<String, Object> serialize() throws Exception {
        Map<String, Object> fields = new HashMap<String, Object>();
        for (Field f : GivenClass.class.getDeclaredFields()) 
            fields.put(f.getName(), f.get(this));
        return fields;
    }

    @Override
    public String toString() {
        return "age=" + age + ", location=" + location + ", name=" + name;
    }
}

Example:

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {

    GivenClass o1 = new GivenClass("Mike", "London", 28);

    Map<String, Object> serialized = o1.serialize();

    GivenClass o2 = new GivenClass(serialized);
    System.out.println(o2.toString());
}

Output:

age=28, location=London, name=Mike