How to include fields in the @ToString annotation in Lombok

Overview

The @ToString annotation is one of the annotations in the project Lombok.

Note: Refer What is the @ToString annotation in Lombok? for the introduction of the annotation.

The @ToString annotation generates an implementation for the toString() method where the class name, along with each field in order, separated by commas, is printed. But sometimes, there is a need to include only specific fields in the string representation of the fields.

For example, consider a Person class that has three attributes - name, age, and address.

@ToString
@AllArgsConstructor
class Person {
      private int age;
      private String name;
      private String address;
}

We define an instance of the Person class:

Person person = new Person(30, "sam", "US");

The default string representation of the above object is as follows:

Person(age=30, name=sam, address=US)

All the fields are present in the output. What if we want only specific fields in the output? and we want to print the name field only:

Person(name=sam)

@ToString.Include and onlyExplicitlyIncluded

onlyExplicitlyIncluded is a boolean parameter of the @ToString annotation that indicates whether to choose fields that are included explicitly.

@ToString.Include indicates which fields have to be included in the string representation of the object. To include a field or the output of an instance method, annotate the respective field or method with @ToString.Include.

Code

Let’s look at the code below:

import lombok.AllArgsConstructor;
import lombok.ToString;

public class Main {

    @AllArgsConstructor
    @ToString(onlyExplicitlyIncluded = true)
    static class Person {

        private final int age;

        @ToString.Include
        private final String name;

        @ToString.Include
        private final String address;
    }


    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Person person = new Person(30, "sam", "US");
        System.out.println("Person object - " + person);
    }
}

Explanation

  • Lines 1 and 2: We import the AllArgsConstructor and ToString annotations.
  • Lines 6 to 8: We define the Person class annotated with @AllArgsConstructor and @ToString annotations. We pass onlyExplicitlyIncluded = true to indicate Lombok to generate output for the fields annotated with @ToString.Include only.
  • Line 10: We define the age field.
  • Lines 13 and 14: We define the name field annotated with @ToString.Include.
  • Lines 16 and 17: We define the address field annotated with @ToString.Include.
  • Line 22: We create an instance of the Person class.
  • Line 23: We print the person instance created in line 22.

The string representation of the person instance contains only name and address.

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