Introspector

A tool to visualize as trees the structure of runtime Java programs.

Introspector is a Java tool that allows you to visualize any runtime structure of Java objects as trees. By using introspection, the object state is presented together with all the child objects included as fields inside the current node.

Introspector may be used as a Swing application to visualize object structures or as an API to store the object structures as HTML or txt files.

Usage

To run Introspector, just download the last .jar file from the releases section. Then, take any Java object you want to visualize as a tree and add the two following lines:

    TreeModel model = new IntrospectorModel("Tree", myObject);
    new IntrospectorView("Introspector", model);

A window like the following one will be displayed:

The previous window is shown for the following IntrospectorDemo.java program included in the examples package:

package examples;
 
import introspector.Introspector;
import introspector.model.IntrospectorModel;
import introspector.view.IntrospectorView;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.ArrayList;

public class IntrospectorDemo {
    public static void main(String... args) {
        RootClass myObject = new RootClass();
        IntrospectorModel model = new IntrospectorModel("Tree", myObject);
        new IntrospectorView("Introspector", model);
    }
}

enum Color {
    red, blue, green
}

class RootClass {
    private final Color color = Color.red;
    private final Node childNode = new Node("Child1");
    private final List<String> stringChildren = new ArrayList<>();
    private final int integerChild;
    private final Person personRecord;


    RootClass() {
        int i;
        for (i = 2; i <= 10; i++)
            this.stringChildren.add("StrChild" + i);
        this.integerChild = i;
        this.personRecord = new Person(12, "Francisco", "Ortin");
}

    @Override
    public String toString() {
        return "Root node";
    }
}

class Node {
    private final String name;
    
    Node(String name) { this.name = name; }
    
    @Override
    public String toString() { return this.name; }
}

record Person(int id, String firstName, String lastName) {}

Using Introspector as an API

Introspector can also be used as an API to store a runtime object structure into an HTML or txt file. To store the object structure pointed by the myObject reference, just write:

    Introspector.writeTreeAsTxt(rootObject, "Tree", "output.txt");
    Introspector.writeTreeAsHtml(rootObject, "Tree", "output.html");

Compilation

You can use maven to compile, test and package Introspector. Alternatively, you can 1) copy the contents of src/main/resources folder into src/main/java and 2) go to the src/main/java directory and compile Introspector by:

    javac introspector/*.java
    javac examples/*.java

Then, you can run any example, just like:

    java examples.IntrospectorDemo

Documentation

Check out the reference documentation of Introspector.

License

MIT license.