Programming Groovy 2

11.2 Querying Methods and Properties

At runtime, we can query an object’s methods and properties to find out if the object supports a certain behavior. This is especially useful for behavior we add dynamically at runtime. We can add behavior not only to classes, but also to select instances of a class.

We can use ​MetaObjectProtocol​’s ​getMetaMethod​ (​MetaClass​ extends ​MetaObjectProtocol​) to get a metamethod. We can use ​getStaticMetaMethod​ if we’re looking for a static method. To get a list of overloaded methods, we use the plural forms of these methods— ​getMetaMethods​ and ​getStaticMetaMethods​ . Similarly, we can use ​getMetaProperty​ and ​getStaticMetaProperty​ for a metaproperty. If we want simply to check for existence and not ...