Derek C. Ashmore created LANG-1195:
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Summary: Enhance MethodUtils to allow invocation of private
methods
Key: LANG-1195
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LANG-1195
Project: Commons Lang
Issue Type: Improvement
Components: lang.reflect.*
Environment: not environment specific
Reporter: Derek C. Ashmore
Priority: Minor
Fix For: 3.5
Currently, MethodUtils is restricted to finding and invoking accessible
methods. Frequently, developers have a need to test 'private' methods. What I
see is that they escalate access to 'protected' in order to more easily provide
test coverage for these methods. From a design perspective, this is bad.
I propose to enhance MethodUtils so that it can easily invoke private methods.
I'm not suggesting that developers should do this in production code, merely
test code. Much as FieldUtils provides access to private fields via the
'forceAccess' overload on many of its methods. I've copied a utility like this
around for years. It would be much more convenient to simply include it with
Commons Lang. I propose adding the following overloads to existing methods on
MethodUtils.
public static Object invokeMethod(final Object object, final boolean
forceAccess, final String methodName)
throws NoSuchMethodException, IllegalAccessException,
InvocationTargetException
public static Object invokeMethod(final Object object, final boolean
forceAccess, final String methodName,
Object... args) throws NoSuchMethodException,
IllegalAccessException, InvocationTargetException
public static Object invokeMethod(final Object object, final boolean
forceAccess, final String methodName,
Object[] args, Class<?>[] parameterTypes)
throws NoSuchMethodException, IllegalAccessException,
InvocationTargetException
Furthermore, I propose the following new method for finding private methods
patterned after getAccessibleMethod:
public static Method getMatchingMethod(final Class<?> cls, final String
methodName,
final Class<?>... parameterTypes)
I have, in fact, forked your github repository and coded this enhancement as
well as unit test coverage for this. I'll add a comment to this ticket once I
get a branch in my fork created and the enhancement checked in. Every effort
has been made to adhere to your coding conventions. Thanks for looking at this.
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