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discontinued
Dart 1 only

Compile-time mirroring for Dart objects.

Compiled Mirrors #

Statically reflecting Dart classes.

Reflection in Dart through dart:mirrors is a powerful tool for building tests and assorted utilities. However, when compiled to JavaScript and run in a browser, mirrors can severely reduce code's performance. In Flutter, mirrors are disabled entirely.

Compiled Mirrors generates a reflection of Dart classes annotated with @compileMirrors. This allows you to do a number of interesting things.

Testing complex classes #

My focus has been on using this as a testing utility for evaluating the fields between two complex objects. For example, suppose we have the following class:

class Person {
  final String firstName;
  final String lastName;
  final int age;
  final Location birthplace;
  final Location residence;
  final University almaMater;

  Person(this.firstName, this.lastName, this.gender, this.age,
      this.birthplace, this.residence, this.almaMater);

  factory Person.fromParents(Person mother, Person father) {
    // Make a new person with traits of both parents.
  }
}

Suppose we want to test the fromParents factory. We'd need to build an expected Person for the results of the test, and an actual Person:

test('fromParents Person factory', () {
  var expected = new Person(/* various fields */);
  var actual = new Person.fromParents(testMother, testFather);

Without an equality definition for this person, we need to test against every field in the Person object:

  expect(actual.firstName, expected.firstName);
  expect(actual.lastName, expected.lastName);
  // boilerplate continues.
});

Very verbose!

Also, if we decide later on that we want to add a birthDate field to Person, the test will pass even if the factory generates a birthDate we didn't expect! This is a bug waiting to happen.

Mirrored fields #

We can avoid this problem with a mirror of the object's fields. If we compile a mirror for the Person object, we can generate an automatically-updating equality test:

test('fromParents Person factory', () {
  var expected = new Person(/* various fields */);
  var actual = new Person.fromParents(testMother, testFather);
  var expectedFields = new Person$CompiledMirror(expected).fields;
  var actualFields = new Person$CompiledMirror(actual).fields;
  for (var fieldName in expectedFields.keys) {
    expect(actualFields[fieldName](), expectedFields[fieldName]());
  }
});

Much simpler and much more reliable!

Other uses #

There are other uses for mirrors. If there's a use case that you'd like a compiled mirror for, please file an issue.

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Compile-time mirroring for Dart objects.

Repository (GitHub)
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License

MIT (LICENSE)

Dependencies

analyzer, build, build_runner, build_test, quiver

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