Is there a Java utility to do a deep comparison of two objects? [closed]

Unitils has this functionality:

Equality assertion through reflection, with different options like ignoring Java default/null values and ignoring order of collections

I love this question! Mainly because it is hardly ever answered or answered badly. It's like nobody has figured it out yet. Virgin territory :)

First off, don't even think about using equals. The contract of equals, as defined in the javadoc, is an equivalence relation (reflexive, symmetric, and transitive), not an equality relation. For that, it would also have to be antisymmetric. The only implementation of equals that is (or ever could be) a true equality relation is the one in java.lang.Object. Even if you did use equals to compare everything in the graph, the risk of breaking the contract is quite high. As Josh Bloch pointed out in Effective Java, the contract of equals is very easy to break:

"There is simply no way to extend an instantiable class and add an aspect while preserving the equals contract"

Besides what good does a boolean method really do you anyway? It'd be nice to actually encapsulate all the differences between the original and the clone, don't you think? Also, I'll assume here that you don't want to be bothered with writing/maintaining comparison code for each object in the graph, but rather you're looking for something that will scale with the source as it changes over time.

Soooo, what you really want is some kind of state comparison tool. How that tool is implemented is really dependent on the nature of your domain model and your performance restrictions. In my experience, there is no generic magic bullet. And it will be slow over a large number of iterations. But for testing the completeness of a clone operation, it'll do the job pretty well. Your two best options are serialization and reflection.

Some issues you will encounter:

• Collection order: Should two collections be considered similar if they hold the same objects, but in a different order?
• Which fields to ignore: Transient? Static?
• Type equivalence: Should field values be of exactly the same type? Or is it ok for one to extend the other?
• There's more, but I forget...

XStream is pretty fast and combined with XMLUnit will do the job in just a few lines of code. XMLUnit is nice because it can report all the differences, or just stop at the first one it finds. And its output includes the xpath to the differing nodes, which is nice. By default it doesn't allow unordered collections, but it can be configured to do so. Injecting a special difference handler (Called a DifferenceListener) allows you to specify the way you want to deal with differences, including ignoring order. However, as soon as you want to do anything beyond the simplest customization, it becomes difficult to write and the details tend to be tied down to a specific domain object.

My personal preference is to use reflection to cycle through all the declared fields and drill down into each one, tracking differences as I go. Word of warning: Don't use recursion unless you like stack overflow exceptions. Keep things in scope with a stack (use a LinkedList or something). I usually ignore transient and static fields, and I skip object pairs that I've already compared, so I don't end up in infinite loops if someone decided to write self-referential code (However, I always compare primitive wrappers no matter what, since the same object refs are often reused). You can configure things up front to ignore collection ordering and to ignore special types or fields, but I like to define my state comparison policies on the fields themselves via annotations. This, IMHO, is exactly what annotations were meant for, to make meta data about the class available at runtime. Something like:

@StatePolicy(unordered=true, ignore=false, exactTypesOnly=true)private List<StringyThing> _mylist;

I think this is actually a really hard problem, but totally solvable! And once you have something that works for you, it is really, really, handy :)

So, good luck. And if you come up with something that's just pure genius, don't forget to share!

See DeepEquals and DeepHashCode() within java-util: https://github.com/jdereg/java-util

This class does exactly what the original author requests.