Question

To make debug-time introspection into classes easy, I’d like to make a generic toString method in the base class for the objects in question. As it’s not performance critical code, I’d like to use Reflection to print out field name/value pairs (“x=1, y=2” etc).

Is there an easy way to do this? I tried several potential solutions, and ran up against security access issues, etc.

To be clear, the toString() method in the base class should reflectively iterate over public vals in any classes that inherit from it, as well as any traits that are mixed in.

Answer 1

import util._                 // For Scala 2.8.x NameTransformer
import scala.tools.nsc.util._ // For Scala 2.7.x NameTransformer

/**
 * Repeatedly run `f` until it returns None, and assemble results in a Stream.
 */
def unfold[A](a: A, f: A => Option[A]): Stream[A] = {
  Stream.cons(a, f(a).map(unfold(_, f)).getOrElse(Stream.empty))
}

def get[T](f: java.lang.reflect.Field, a: AnyRef): T = {
  f.setAccessible(true)
  f.get(a).asInstanceOf[T]
}

/**
 * @return None if t is null, Some(t) otherwise.
 */
def optNull[T <: AnyRef](t: T): Option[T] = if (t eq null) None else Some(t)

/**
 * @return a Stream starting with the class c and continuing with its superclasses.
 */
def classAndSuperClasses(c: Class[_]): Stream[Class[_]] = unfold[Class[_]](c, (c) => optNull(c.getSuperclass))

def showReflect(a: AnyRef): String = {
  val fields = classAndSuperClasses(a.getClass).flatMap(_.getDeclaredFields).filter(!_.isSynthetic)
  fields.map((f) => NameTransformer.decode(f.getName) + "=" + get(f, a)).mkString(",")
}

// TEST
trait T {
  val t1 = "t1"
}

class Base(val foo: String, val ?? : Int) {
}

class Derived(val d: Int) extends Base("foo", 1) with T

assert(showReflect(new Derived(1)) == "t1=t1,d=1,??=1,foo=foo")