csv - OpenCSV - How to map selected columns to Java Bean regardless of order?

Question

I have a CSV file with the following columns: id, fname, telephone, lname, address.

I have a Person class with id, fname and lname data members. I want to map only these columns to Person object from a CSV file and discard telephone and address columns. How can I do this? The solution must scale as more columns are added in future. And should work regardless of column position.

In an ideal solution user will only specify columns to read and it should just work.

Answer 1

You can use HeaderColumnNameTranslateMappingStrategy. Lets assume your CSV has the following columns: Id, Fname, Telephone, Lname, Address for the sake of simplicity.

CsvToBean<Person> csvToBean = new CsvToBean<Person>();

Map<String, String> columnMapping = new HashMap<String, String>();
columnMapping.put("Id", "id");
columnMapping.put("Fname", "fname");
columnMapping.put("Lname", "lname");

HeaderColumnNameTranslateMappingStrategy<Person> strategy = new HeaderColumnNameTranslateMappingStrategy<Person>();
strategy.setType(Person.class);
strategy.setColumnMapping(columnMapping);

List<Person> list = null;
CSVReader reader = new CSVReader(new InputStreamReader(ClassLoader.getSystemResourceAsStream("test.csv")));
list = csvToBean.parse(strategy, reader);

The columnMapping will map the columns with your Person object.