Renaming openconnection() or cutting it up?

Question

Is it possible to rename the openconnection()?

Orginal:

URL url = new URL(\"http://google.co.in\");
URLConnection connection = url.**openConnection**();
         


        

Answer 1

For the first part, you can't do that directly. You can't derive from URL since it's final, so you'd have to write a proxy class, and that would be a waste of time and could introduce bugs.

For the second one, you could sort of do that using reflection. It's not trivial to do, that's an advanced topic. So I'd avoid that until you are very familiar with the Java language in general.

If you explained what you were trying to achieve, maybe you'd get better suggestions.

Answer 2

Take this answer with a large bag of salt. This will work but you generally don't want to muck around with reflection unless you're very comfortable with Java.

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You can accomplish #2 with reflection, ignoring all sorts of nasty exceptions that you'll have to deal with:

String st1 = "open";
String st2 = "Connection";
URL url = new URL("http://google.co.in");
Object obj = url.getClass().getMethod(st1 + st2).invoke(url);
URLConnection connection = (URLConnection) obj;

See:

• Object#getClass()
• Class#getMethod(String, Class...)
• Method#invoke(Object, Object...)

The potential exceptions you'll have to deal with somehow, from one line of code:

• NoSuchMethodException
• SecurityException
• IllegalAccessException
• IllegalArgumentException
• InvocationTargetException

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I'm not really sure why you want to do this, though. There is almost certainly a better way to accomplish the same end result. What is the bigger problem you're trying to solve?