Simple Reflection Example

I am working on extracting various pieces of information from different classes of objects. I thought that rather than manually going through and using getters for the fields of each object, I would try using reflection. The code below is a simple use of reflection. I create a Class object of the type of class for the object, then I get the method of that class. Finally, the method of the object is invoked to get the required information out.

package utils;

import java.lang.reflect.Method;

public class ClassSpy
{
 public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
 {
  //Specify the class that we will do a reflection on
  String className = "utils.SampleClass";
  //Create a Class object associated with className
  Class toRun = Class.forName(className);
  //create an instance of the method which we 
     will later invoke
  Method method = findMethod(toRun, "getId");
  //create an instance of the class
  SampleClass user = new SampleClass();
  user.setId(5);
  //invoke the method
  int id = (Integer)method.invoke(user);
  System.out.println("id "+id);
 }
 private static Method findMethod(Class clazz, 
   String functionName) throws Exception
 {
  Method[] methods = clazz.getMethods();
  for (int i=0; i<methods.length; i++)
  {
   System.out.println(methods[i].getName());
  if (methods[i].getName().equals(functionName))
  return methods[i];
  }
  return null;
 }
}

The code for sample class is as follows: