Sometimes, when we import 3rd-party libraries, we can find cases where the information we want is has been populated in an object but, the property is a private one and there are no methods to recover it. Here, it is where the Java reflection capabilities can help us.

Note: Use reflection carefully and, usually, as a last resource.

Let’s say we have a simple class with a private property:

class A {
    private String value = "value";
}

We want to access the property “value” but, for obvious reasons, we cannot do it.

We can implement our reflection method to access the property value:

import java.lang.reflect.Field;

public class Reflection {

   public static void main(String[] args) throws NoSuchFieldException, IllegalAccessException {
      final A a = new A();
      final Field secureRenegotiationField = a.getClass().getDeclaredField("value");

      secureRenegotiationField.setAccessible(true);

      System.out.println((String) secureRenegotiationField.get(a));
   }
}

With these few lines of code, we will be able to access the value.