Question

Is it good or bad practice auto-generating toString methods for some simple classes?

I was thinking of generating something like below where it takes the variable names and produces a toString method that prints the name followed by its value.

private String name;
private int age;
private double height;

public String toString(){
   return String.format("Name: %s Age: %d Height %f", name, age, height);
}

Answer 1

Eclipse 3.5.2 (and possibly earlier versions) already provides this feature. If you right-click within the editor, you’ll find it under Source -> Generate toString()…

To answer your question about whether it’s a bad practice to autogenerate toString(), my opinion is that it is not. If the generated code is very similar to the code you would have written yourself, then why bother typing it out?