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Confessions and Confusions of a Freelance Fullstacker.

Ashok Mannolu Arunachalam, javautilfixspring
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Fix: org.springframework.beans.BeanUtils: ignore null values on copying properties

I have recently encountered a situation where I had to copy properties between two domain objects like DTO vs VO.

Even though BeanUtils was helpful in most cases via copyProperties, in a particular case, I needed it to ignore the properties with null values getting copied and overwriting the values in the target.

I came across this implementation of the said method and understood it fully in order to make the change I needed.

java
import lombok.AccessLevel;
import lombok.NoArgsConstructor;
import org.springframework.beans.FatalBeanException;
import org.springframework.util.Assert;
import java.beans.PropertyDescriptor;
import java.lang.reflect.Method;
import java.lang.reflect.Modifier;
@NoArgsConstructor(access = AccessLevel.PRIVATE)
public final class BeanUtils
extends org.springframework.beans.BeanUtils {
public static void copyNonNullProperties(
Object source, Object target
) {
Assert.notNull(source, "Source must not be null");
Assert.notNull(target, "Target must not be null");
Class<?> actualEditable = target.getClass();
PropertyDescriptor[] targetPds = getPropertyDescriptors(actualEditable);
for (PropertyDescriptor targetPd : targetPds) {
if (targetPd.getWriteMethod() != null) {
PropertyDescriptor sourcePd = getPropertyDescriptor(source.getClass(), targetPd.getName());
if (
sourcePd != null
&& sourcePd.getReadMethod() != null
) {
try {
Method readMethod = sourcePd.getReadMethod();
if (
!Modifier.isPublic(
readMethod.getDeclaringClass()
.getModifiers())
) {
readMethod.setAccessible(true);
}
Object value = readMethod.invoke(source);
// Ignore properties with null values.
if (value != null) {
Method writeMethod = targetPd.getWriteMethod();
if (
!Modifier.isPublic(
writeMethod.getDeclaringClass()
.getModifiers())
) {
writeMethod.setAccessible(true);
}
writeMethod.invoke(target, value);
}
} catch (Throwable ex) {
throw new FatalBeanException(
"Could not copy properties from source to target", ex
);
}
}
}
}
}
}

To make it part of the BeanUtils, I have extended the said util class and added the above copyNonNullProperties method in our project. ^_^

Enjoy \O/