How to get the name of a variable in Kotlin?

Question

I have a Kotlin class in my application with a lot of attributes, what I want to build is a method that stores the variable name in a dictionary. The dictionary looks like this:

HashMap<String, Pair<Any, Any>>()

The purpose of this is to store the changes made to a certain attribute, I store the name of the variable as the key and in the Pair I store the old value and the new value. To notify a change I use the Observer pattern. So whenever a setter is called from an attribute a change will be notified and stored to the dictionary.

The code below results in the folowing:

var person = Person("Harry", 44)
person.age = 45

HashMap("age", (44, 45))

Right now I am just hardcoding the variable name in as a String, so my question is:

How to dynamicly get the name of a variable in Kotlin?

I saw the same question in Java: Java Reflection: How to get the name of a variable?

Also some other questions about the same topic claiming it is not possible: Get the name property of a variable

I can understand that it is not possible to get the name of a variable, because the compiler simple doesn't have that information, but I am still currious to see if others have any sollution for this problem.

Answer 1

As stated in the Kotlin documentation about Reflection:

val x = 1

fun main() {
    println(::x.get())
    println(::x.name) 
}

The expression ::x evaluates to a property object of type KProperty<Int>, which allows us to read its value using get() or retrieve the property name using the name property.