passing method names as string

[prasanna kumar]

Hello Everyone,

i have a situation where I'm passing method name as a string. i need to call this method on a object.

let me make myself clear..

lets say there is a object bankdetails. it has like 100 methods method1(), method2(),...and so on
i have a string object which gets method names like "method1" or "method2" or..
i need to check this string value and call bankdetails.method1 or bankdetails.method2 or... so on based on this string's value.
one way of doing this would be to use multiple if then else statements to see the values and call the appropriate method. in this case if the object has 100 methods then i need to write 100 statements to check for this...
like (if methodname == "method1" then call bankdetails.method1 else if methodname == "method2" then call bankdetails.method2 ..)

i surely feel there should be another way of doing this..

thanks in advance
arun

[Jean-Francois Briere]

You must use the reflection API for this.
Here is a very simple example to execute your methods by name.
Here the bankDetails methods to be executed have no arguments and return nothing.

void invokeBankMethod(Object bankDetails, String methodName) throws Exception {
    Method method = bankDetails.getClass().getMethod(methodName, null);
    method.invoke(bankDetails, null);
}

Regards