Reflections

I have been recently been reading over some of Steve Yegge's old posts and they reminded me of a theme I wanted to cover.  There is a idea we call meta-cognition, that testers often use to defocus and focus, to occasionally come back for air and look for what we might have missed.  It is a important part of our awareness.  We try to literally figure out what we don't know and transfer that into a coherent question(s) or comment(s).  Part of what we do is reflect on the past, using a learned sub-conscious routine and attempt to gather data.

In the same way, programming too has ways of doing this, in some cases, in some frames of reference.  This is the subject I wish to visit upon and consider a few different ways.  In some languages this is called reflections, which uses a reification of typing to introspect on the code.  Other languages allow other styles of the same concept and they call them 'eval' statements.  No matter the name, the basic idea is brilliant.  Some computer languages literally can consider things in a meta sense intelligently.

Reflections

So lets consider an example. Here is the class under consideration:

class HighScore {
 String playerName;
 int score;
 Date created;
 int placement;
 String gameName;
 String levelName;
 //...Who knows what else might belong here.
}

First done poorly in pseudo code, here is a way to inject test variables for HighScore:

function testVariableSetup(HighScore highScore) {
highScore.playerName = RandomString();
highScore.gameName = RandomString();
highScore.levelName = RandomString();
highScore.score = RandomNumber();
highScore.create = RandomDate();
//... I got tired.
}

Now here is a more ideal version:

function testVariableSetup(Object class) {
for each variable in class.Variables {
 if(variable.type == String) then variable.value = RandomString();
 if(variable.type == Number) then variable.value = RandomNumber();
 if(variable.type == Date) then variable.value = RandomDate();
}

Now what happens when you add a new variable to your class?  For that matter, what happens when you have 2 or more classes you need to do this in?  The first version can be applied to anything that has Strings, Dates and Numbers.  Perhaps we are missing some types, like Booleans, but that doesn't take too much effort to get the majority of the simple types.  Once you have that, you only have to pass in a generic object and it will magically set all fields.  Perhaps you want filtering, but that too is just another feature in the method.

The cool thing is, this can also be used to get all the fields without knowing what the fields are. In fact, this one is so simple, I am going to show a real life example, done in Java:

//import java.lang.reflect.Field;
//import java.util.*;

 public static List<String> getFieldNames(Object object) {
  List<String> names = new ArrayList<String>();
  for(Field f : object.getClass().getFields()) {
   f.setAccessible(true);
   names.add(f.getName());
  }
  return names;
 }

 public static Object getFieldValue(String fieldName, Object object) {
  try{
   Field f = object.getClass().getDeclaredField(fieldName);
   f.setAccessible(true);
   return f.get(object);
  }catch (Throwable t) {
   throw new Error(t);
  }
 }

 public static Map<String, Object> getFields(Object object) {
  HashMap<String, Object> map = new HashMap<String, Object>();
  for(String item : getFieldNames(object)) {
   map.put(item, getFieldValue(item, object));
  }
  return map;
 }

Lets first define the term "Field."  This is a Java term for a variable, be it public or private.  In this case, there is code to get all the field names, get any field value and get a map of field names to values. This allows you to write really quick debug strings by simply automatically reflecting any object and spitting out name/value pairs. Furthermore, you can make it so that it would filter out private variables, variables with a name like X or rather than getting fields, use it to get properties rather than variables.  Obviously this can be rather powerful.


Eval

Let me give one other consideration of how reflective like properties can work.  Consider the eval statement, a method of loading in code dynamically.  First, starting with a very simple JavaScript function, let me show you what eval can do:

  var x = 10;
  alert( eval('(x + 2) * 5'));

This would display an alert with the value 60. In fact, an eval can execute any amount of code, including very complex logic. This means you can generate logic using strings rather than hard code it.

While I believe the eval statement is rather slow (in some cases), it can be useful for generating dynamically generated code.  I'm not going to write out an exact example for this, but I want to give you an idea of a problem:

for(int a = 0; a!=10; a++) {
  for(int b = 0; b!=10; b++) {
    //for ... {
      test(X[a][b][...]);
    //}
  }
}

First of all, I do know you could use recursion to deal with this problem. That's actually a hard problem to solve, hard to follow and hard to debug. If you were in a production environment, maybe that would be the way to go for performance reasons, but for testing, performance is often not as critical. Now imagine if you had something that generated dynamic strings? I will again attempt to pseudo code an example:

CreateOpeningsFor(nVariables, startValue, endValue) {
  String opening = "for(a{0} = {1}; a{0}!={2}; a{0}++) {";  
  String open = "";
  for(int i = 0; i!=nVariables; i++) {
    open = open + "\n" + String.Format(opening, i, startValue, endValue);
  }
  return open;
}


eval(CreateOpenFor(5, 0, 10) + CreateFunctionFor("test", "X", 5) + CreateCloseFor(5));
//TODO write CreateFunctionFor, CreateCloseFor...  
//Should look like this: String function = "{0}({1}{2});" String closing = "}";

While I skipped some details, it should be obvious to someone who programs that this can be completed. Is this a great method? Well, it does the same thing as the hard coded method, yet it is dynamically built, thus is easily changed. You can log the created function even and place it in code if you get worried about performance. Then if you need to change it, change the generator instead of the code. I don't believe this solves all problems, but it is a useful way of thinking about code. Another tool in the tool belt.

The next question you might ask is, do I in fact use these techniques? Yes, I find these tools to be invaluable for some problem sets. I have testing code that automatically reflects and generates lots of different values and applies them to various fields or variables. I have used it in debugging. I have used it to create easily filterable dictionaries so I could get all variables with names like X. It makes the inflexibly type system into a helpful systems. I have even used it in creating a simple report database system which used reflections to create insert/update statements where the code field names are the column names in the database. Is it right for every environment? No, of course not, but be warned, as a tool it can feel a little like the proverbial hammer which makes everything look like nails. You just have to keep in mind that it is often a good ad-hoc tool, but not always a production worthy tool without significant design consideration. That being said, after a few uses and misuses, most good automators can learn when to use it and when not to.

Another reasonable question is what other techniques are useful and similar to this? One closely related tool would be regular expressions, a tool I don't wish to go in depth on as I feel like there is a ton of data on it. The other useful technique is known as annotations or attributes. These are used to define meta data about a field, method or class. As I think there is a lot more details to go over, I will try to write a second post on this topic in combinations with reflections as they are powerful together.