Question

I’m trying to use an event dispatcher to allow a model to notify subscribed listeners when it changes. the event dispatcher receives a handler class and a method name to call during dispatch. the presenter subscribes to the model changes and provide a Handler implementation to be called on changes.

Here’s the code (I’m sorry it’s a bit long).

EventDispacther:

package utils;

public class EventDispatcher<T> {
    List<T> listeners;
    private String methodName;

    public EventDispatcher(String methodName) {
        listeners = new ArrayList<T>();
        this.methodName = methodName;
    }

    public void add(T listener) {
        listeners.add(listener);
    }

    public void dispatch() {
        for (T listener : listeners) {
            try {
                Method method = listener.getClass().getMethod(methodName);
                method.invoke(listener);
            } catch (Exception e) {
                System.out.println(e.getMessage());
            }
        }
    }
}

Model:

package model;

public class Model {
    private EventDispatcher<ModelChangedHandler> dispatcher;

    public Model() {
        dispatcher = new EventDispatcher<ModelChangedHandler>("modelChanged");
    }

    public void whenModelChange(ModelChangedHandler handler) {
        dispatcher.add(handler);
    }

    public void change() {
        dispatcher.dispatch();
    }
}

ModelChangedHandler:

package model;

public interface ModelChangedHandler {
    void modelChanged();
}

Presenter:

package presenter;

public class Presenter {

    private final Model model;

    public Presenter(Model model) {
        this.model = model;
        this.model.whenModelChange(new ModelChangedHandler() {

            @Override
            public void modelChanged() {
                System.out.println("model changed");
            }
        });
    }
}

Main:

package main;

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Model model = new Model();
        Presenter presenter = new Presenter(model);
        model.change();
    }
}

Now, I expect to get the “model changed” message. However, I’m getting an java.lang.IllegalAccessException: Class utils.EventDispatcher can not access a member of class presenter.Presenter$1 with modifiers “public”.

I understand that the class to blame is the anonymous class i created inside the presenter, however I don’t know how to make it any more ‘public’ than it currently is. If i replace it with a named nested class it seem to work. It also works if the Presenter and the EventDispatcher are in the same package, but I can’t allow that (several presenters in different packages should use the EventDispatcher)

any ideas?

Answer 1

This is a bug in the JVM (bug 4819108)

The workaround is to call method.setAccessible(true) before the call to method.invoke(listener)