URL Encode Object/Simple Object Reflection in Apex

Hey all,

Kind of a quick yet cool post for you today. Have you ever wanted to be able to iterate over the properties of a custom class/object? Maybe wanted to read out all the values, or for some other reason (such as serializing the object perhaps) wanted to be able to figure out what all properties an object contained but couldn’t find a way? We all know Apex has come a long way, but it still is lacking a few core features, reflection being one of them. Recently I had a requirement were I wanted to be able to take an object and serialize it into URL format. I didn’t want to have to have to manually type out every property of the object since it could change, and I’m lazy like that. Without reflection this seems impossible, but it’s not!

Remembering that the deserialize json method that Apex has is capable of creating an iteratable version of an object by casting it into a list, or a map suddenly it becomes much more viable. Check it out.

 

    public static string urlEncodeObject(object objectToEncode)
    {
        string urlEncodedString;
        String serializedObject = JSON.serialize(objectToEncode);
        
        Map<String,Object> deserializedObject = (Map<String,Object>) JSON.deserializeUntyped(serializedObject);
        
        for(String key : deserializedObject.keySet())
        {
            urlEncodedString+= key+'='+string.valueOf(deserializedObject.get(key))+'&';
        }
        urlEncodedString = urlEncodedString.substring(0,urlEncodedString.length()-1);
        urlEncodedString = encodingUtil.urlEncode(urlEncodedString,'utf-8');
        return urlEncodedString;
    }       

There you have it. By simply simply serializing an object, then deserializing it, we can now iterate over it. Pretty slick eh? Not perfect I know, and doesn’t work awesome for complex objects, but it’s better than nothing until Apex introduces some real reflection abilities.