By "a bit more complicated", I meant something like the following example. It's based on a blog post I wrote recently: http://glaforge.free.fr/weblog/index.php?itemid=247

With some modifications, here what you can get to have an ordered list of properties defined in a class:

import org.codehaus.groovy.ast.expr.* import org.codehaus.groovy.ast.stmt.* import org.codehaus.groovy.ast.* import org.codehaus.groovy.control.* import org.codehaus.groovy.classgen.* import java.security.CodeSource

def scriptText = """ class Customer { def name def phone def address1 def address2 } """

// we define a custom visitor that traverses the AST just to look at class properties class PropertyVisitor extends ClassCodeVisitorSupport { def orderedProperties = [] void visitProperty(PropertyNode node) { orderedProperties << node.name }

protected SourceUnit getSourceUnit() { return source; } }

// we define our custom PrimaryClassNodeOperation // to be able to hook our code visitor class CustomSourceOperation extends CompilationUnit.PrimaryClassNodeOperation { CodeVisitorSupport visitor void call(SourceUnit source, GeneratorContext context, ClassNode classNode) throws CompilationFailedException { classNode.visitContents(visitor) } }

// we use our own class loader to add our phase operation class MyClassLoader extends GroovyClassLoader { CodeVisitorSupport visitor protected CompilationUnit createCompilationUnit(CompilerConfiguration config, CodeSource source) { CompilationUnit cu = super.createCompilationUnit(config, source) cu.addPhaseOperation(new CustomSourceOperation(visitor: visitor), Phases.CLASS_GENERATION) return cu } }

def visitor = new PropertyVisitor() def myCL = new MyClassLoader(visitor: visitor) // simply by parsing the script with our classloader // our visitor will be called and will visit the properties of the class in order def script = myCL.parseClass(scriptText)

assert ['name', 'phone', 'address1', 'address2'] == visitor.orderedProperties