I got an application which should call different methods, based on the params' input. My idea until now is basically, that I create a Switch and call the methods separately by its case. Example:
switch (methodName)
{
case "method1":
method1();
break;
case "method2":
method2();
break;
default:
System.out.println(methodName + " is not a valid method!");
}
I was considering the option to invoke the method by its given string, as provided in this question:
How do I invoke a Java method when given the method name as a string?
But then I read from one of the answers, that it's not safe. What do you guys think?
If you need to go from a string to a method call, reflection may be your best option. There are no great safety issues involved, especially if you constrain the set of methods that are allowed to be called. Using a Map<String, Method> is one way to achieve it, with the benefit of improved performance since the main bottleneck is not reflective method invocation, but method lookup.
Without reflection you could achieve this with a Map<String, Callable>, where you implement Callable with an anonymous class instance for each method call. Quite a bit more boilerplate code, but "type safe".
You can achieve the same functionality as reflection by using the Command design pattern. It wraps action into objects, so they can be looked up and invoked using a common interface.
Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_pattern
