Question

Note, this is not about marshaling a properties object.

I’d like to marshall to a properties format. Example:

class Foo { String a = "aaa"; Item i = new Item(); }
class Item { String val = "Value"; }

marshall( new 

into

a = Hello
i.value = Value

I know this approach has it’s limitations, but that’s ok.

Is there something along these lines?

If not, is there some simple expression language lib which can do both – querying object and identifying “string keys” in it’s object tree?

I’ve checked BeanUtils – nothing there.

Answer 1

You can use objectprops(http://code.google.com/p/objectprops/) for this:

ObjectPropertiesStore store = new ObjectPropertiesStore();

// write the object to the store        
store.writeObject(new Foo());

// let's get the Properties object and print the contents to System.out
Properties properties = store.getDatabase();
properties.store( System.out, "My test");

Or you could implement this in an easy way using ReflectionToStringBuilder of commons-lang and passing a custom ToStringStyle that you implement yourself, and the load the resulting string into a Properties object.