Hey there!

I'm setting public fields of the Object 'this' via reflection. Both the field name and the value are given as String. I use several various field types: Boolean, Integer, Float, Double, an own enum, and a String. It works with all of them except with a String. The exception that gets thrown is that no method with the Signature String.valueOf(String) exists... Now I use a dirty instanceof workaround to detect if each field is a String and in that case just copy the value to the field.

private void setField(String field, String value) throws Exception {
   Field wField = this.getClass().getField(field);

   if(wField.get(this) instanceof String){ //TODO dirrrrty hack
    //stupid workaround as java.lang.String.valueOf(java.lang.String) fails...
    wField.set(this, value);
   }else{
    Method parseMethod = wField.getType().getMethod("valueOf", new Class[]{String.class});
    wField.set(this, parseMethod.invoke(wField, value));
   }
 }

Any ideas how to avoid that workaround?

Do you think java.lang.String should support the method valueOf(String)?

thanks,

fabb