Easy Deep Cloning of Serializable and Non-Serializable Objects in Java

Frequently developers rely on 3d party libraries to avoid reinventing the wheel, particularly in the Java world, with projects like Apache and Spring so prevalent. When dealing with these frameworks, we often have little or no control of the behaviour of their classes.
This can sometimes lead to problems. For instance, if you want to deep clone an object that doesn’t provide a suitable clone method, what are your options, short of writing a bunch of code?

Clone through Serialization
The simplest approach is to clone by taking advantage of an object being Serializable. Apache Commons provides a method to do this, but for completeness, code to do it yourself is below also.

@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
public static  T cloneThroughSerialize(T t) throws Exception {
   ByteArrayOutputStream bos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
   serializeToOutputStream(t, bos);
   byte[] bytes = bos.toByteArray();
   ObjectInputStream ois = new ObjectInputStream(new ByteArrayInputStream(bytes));
   return (T)ois.readObject();
}

private static void serializeToOutputStream(Serializable ser, OutputStream os)
                                                          throws IOException {
   ObjectOutputStream oos = null;
   try {
      oos = new ObjectOutputStream(os);
      oos.writeObject(ser);
      oos.flush();
   } finally {
      oos.close();
   }
}

// using our custom method
Object cloned = cloneThroughSerialize (someObject);

// or with Apache Commons
cloned = org.apache.commons.lang. SerializationUtils.clone(someObject);

But what if the class we want to clone isn’t Serializable and we have no control over the source code or can’t make it Serializable?

Option 1 – Java Deep Cloning Library
There’s a nice little library which can deep clone virtually any Java Object – cloning. It takes advantage of Java’s excellent reflection capabilities to provide optimized deep-cloned versions of objects.

Cloner cloner=new Cloner();
Object cloned = cloner.deepClone(someObject);

As you can see, it’s very simple and effective, and requires minimal code. It has some more advanced abilities beyond this simple example, which you can check out here.

Option 2 – JSON Cloning
What about if we are not able to introduce a new library to our codebase? Some of us deal with approval processes to introduce new libraries, and it may not be worth it for a simple use case.

Well, as long as we have some way to serialize and restore an object, we can make a deep copy. JSON is commonly used, so it’s a good candidate,since most of us use one JSON library or another.

Most JSON libraries in Java have the ability to effectively serialize any POJO without any configuration or mapping required. This means that if you have a JSON library and cannot or will not introduce more libraries to provide deep cloning, you can leverage an existing JSON library to get the same effect. Note this method will be slower than others, but for the vast majority of applications, this won’t cause any performance problems.

Below is an example using the GSON library.

@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
public static  T cloneThroughJson(T t) {
   Gson gson = new Gson();
   String json = gson.toJson(t);
   return (T) gson.fromJson(json, t.getClass());
}
// ...
Object cloned = cloneThroughJson(someObject);

Note that this is likely only to work if the copied object has a default no-argument constructor. In the case of GSON, you can use an instance creator to get around this. Other frameworks have similar concepts, so you can use that if you hit an issue with an unmodifiable class having not having the default constructor.

Conclusion
One thing I do recommend is that for any classes you need to clone, you should add some unit tests to ensure everything behaves as expected. This can prevent changes to the classes (e.g. upgrading library versions) from breaking your application without your knowledge, especially if you have a continuous integration environment set up.

I’ve outlined a couple methods to clone an object outside of normal cases without any custom code. If you’ve used any other methods to get the same result, please share.

From http://www.carfey.com/blog/easy-deep-cloning-of-serializable-and-non-serializable-objects-in-java/