Generate getter/setter name from variable Name in java

Question

I am looking for a library which gives generated getter method name by looking up variable name, I can do it my own naively through get+change the first letter of variable name to upperCase and then append to it.

Answer 1

There are 2 conflicting beanspecs.

One is simple and just says: Take the name, uppercase the first letter, slap set in front for setters, and slap is or get in front for getters.

However, there are real issues with that:

• Does Boolean (note the capital!) imply isFoo() or getFoo()? Most beanspec implementations think the answer is getFoo(), but humans tend to think/expect isFoo().
• Uppercase is just plain wrong. The correct way to do it, is of course, titlecase. If all you know is english, there is no difference between these two concepts. However, For example, FF ligatures exist. Lowercase, that's a single symbol that looks like ff, uppercase, that'd be FF, but titlecase, that looks like Ff. How does one deal with the fact that a spec strongly suggests a stupid thing? Some implementations decide to implement the spirit and not the letter - and thus invoke toTitleCase to generate it, some implement the letter and not the spirit, and invoke toUpperCase. Leaving a world split in twain - with some beanspec things expecting / generating Ff, and others generating FF.
• What do you do with a name that consists of multiple camel-cased-together parts, where the first part consists of a single letter? Imagine I have public class Chart {} and one of its fields is called String xAxisUnit. If I beanspec that in a very very simple way the way you described it, I get getXAxisUnit(). And indeed the first release of beanspec says that's right. But later, different beanspec docs say that the right way to 'getify' that is actually getxAxisUnit(), for complicated reasons. Now again we are faced with a dilemma - which of the various conflicting beanspecs do you want? (For context as to why this occurs and which docs are out there that are in conflict, I suggest you read through this lombok issue about the problem) - all the relevant links, as well as direct quotes from the various specs, are present there. There's also this StackOverflow question.

Thus, the real question becomes: Which spec would you care to follow?

Here's lombok's CapitalizationStrategy - it's only half a page and covers the capitalization part for both (you're going to have to figure out the set/is/get part). In case you don't want to rely on java.beans.Introspector because it doesn't properly deal with all these variations.

TL;DR: If you have variable names that starts with a letter that has a different titlecase than uppercase, you're in trouble. If you have properties whose type is capital-B Boolean, that's problematic. It's also problematic if you have a field whose first 'word' is only a single letter long: Various beanspecs have different opinions on how to convert those from getFoobar to foobar form and back.