Get the name of an attribute class or class function as String

Question

Let's say I have the following class:

class Person {
  @BeanProperty
  var firstName: String = _
}

Is it possible to get the string representation of "firstName" in a safe way, by reflection, or something else? Or a string representation of the generated getFirstName function?

It would be nice if it looked like this:

val p = new Person
p.getFunction(p.getFirstName).toString // "getFirstName"
p.getAttribute(p.firstName).toString   // "firstName"

EDIT

Ok, more explanation is needed;)

Let's say I want to build an SQL query as follows:

val jpql = "select p from Person p where p.age > 20";

So, I want to make this as typical as possible and write something like this:

val jpql = "select p from " + classOf[Person].getName + " where p." + 
  Person.getAttName(p.age) + " > 20";

Thus, if it is possible to reorganize Scala code in the future, I can change the name of the Person attribute without breaking my code.

Answer 1

Scala . " " :

scala> class Person(val firstName:String)         
defined class Person

scala> val methodRef = new Person("i").firstName _
methodRef: () => String = <function0>

scala> methodRef()                                
res1: String = i

, . , , JDBC . Squeryl:

import org.squeryl.Schema
import org.squeryl.Session
import org.squeryl.PrimitiveTypeMode._
import org.squeryl.adapters.H2Adapter
import org.squeryl.SessionFactory

object Sample {
case class Person(val firstName:String, val age:Int)

object AppSchema extends Schema {
  val people = table[Person]("People")
}

def main(args:Array[String]) { 
  import AppSchema.people
  Class.forName("org.h2.Driver")
  SessionFactory.concreteFactory = Some(()=> Session.create(java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:h2:~/temp/db", "sa", ""), new H2Adapter))

  transaction {
    AppSchema.create
    people.insert(new Person("ifischer", 92)) 
    people.insert(new Person("baby", 2)) 
    for (olderPerson <- from(people)(p=> where(p.age gt 20) select(p))) {
      println(olderPerson) //wont return "baby"!
    }
  } 
}
}

? , , , String. , , p.ssn - .

Answer 2

, , ( , , ?). , java.lang.String.

scala> classOf[String].getMethods.map(_.getName)
res4: Array[java.lang.String] = Array(equals, hashCode, toString, charAt, compareTo, 
compareToIgnoreCase, concat, endsWith, equalsIgnoreCase, getBytes, getBytes, getBytes, 
getChars, indexOf, indexOf, indexOf, indexOf, intern, lastIndexOf, lastIndexOf, 
lastIndexOf, lastIndexOf, length, regionMatches, regionMatches, replace, startsWith, 
startsWith, substring, substring, toCharArray, toL...