How to compare all properties values from a two equal classes - class

Question

I've a class defined as follows:
Public Class DeviceConfig
Private _maxNumCodesGlobal As Integer
Private _maxNumCodesDataMatrix As Integer
Private _maxNumCodesQR As Integer
Private _maxNumCodesBarcode As Integer
Private _partialResults As String
Private _allowIdenticalSymbols As String
Private _datamatrixValidation As Integer
Private _datamatrixValidationType
'AND MUCH MORE PROPERTIES
'GETTERS & SETTERS
End Class
as you can see it's a long list of properties in this class.
I need to compare the values of the properties from an instance with the values of the properties of another instance.
Is there a way to iterate through all of them, or even better, just comparing both classes and get true/false if they have the same properties values or not?
if instance1=instance2 then true
Thank you

Answer 1

I encountered the same problem and created this method. Hopefully it will help you.
It uses reflections to iterate through the public fields, ignoring those with the JsonIgnore annotation.
This method is not considering fields as List, Set, etc.
You can change it to work for properties instead of fields.
protected <T> boolean equals(T object1, T object2) {
Field[] fields = object1.getClass().getFields();
for (Field field : fields) {
if (field.getAnnotation(JsonIgnore.class)!= null) continue; //do not check the fields with JsonIgnore
Object value1;
Object value2;
try {
value1 = field.get(object1);
value2 = field.get(object2);
} catch (Exception e) {
logger.error("Error comparing objects. Exception: " + e.getMessage());
return false;
}
//comparing
if (value1 == null) {
if (value2 != null)
return false;
} else if (!value1.equals(value2))
return false;
}
return true;
}