Re: private fields returned by properties in Groovy 4

So something like this would be similar to the old behavior?

obj.metaClass.properties.findAll { Modifier.isPublic(it.modifiers)
}.collectEntries {
            PropertyValue pv = new PropertyValue(obj, it)
            [it.name, pv.getValue()]
        }

Is the concern that this is a breaking change and that's why it wasn't
back ported to Groovy 4?

On Mon, Nov 10, 2025 at 1:22 PM Milles, Eric (TR Technology) via dev
<dev-GSC0n/0aZo1d/SJB6HiN2Ni2O/[email protected]> wrote:
>
> The behavior of MetaClass#getProperties was changed for Groovy 4 as part of GROOVY-5169 (JSON serialization fix).  It was mentioned in some of the discussion and notes that getProperties() did return private properties in some edge cases — I don't have examples at hand.  With that in mind, it was recommended that callers check the modifiers of the MetaProperty instances and filter as necessary.
>
> getProperties() was amended to exclude inaccessible (to the caller) and synthetic properties as part of GROOVY-10438 and GROOVY-10555.  Since the caller is not propagated as thoroughly before Groovy 5, it is difficult to provide a good backport of the property filtering.  And this also falls within the realm of metaclass breaking changes.
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: James Daugherty <[email protected]>
> Sent: Monday, November 10, 2025 12:00 PM
> To: Groovy_Developers <dev-GSC0n/0aZo1d/SJB6HiN2Ni2O/[email protected]>; dev-FvxHgLy0BgRd/SJB6HiN2Ni2O/[email protected] <[email protected]>
> Subject: [EXT] private fields returned by properties in Groovy 4
>
> External Email: Use caution with links and attachments.
>
> Hi Everyone,
>
> I opened https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/GROOVY-11799__;!!GFN0sa3rsbfR8OLyAw!fZIzdacaMb2b19GYD9RTQgd1vL7DxEEknudlIj-_Tb9374PSrRrWqZUbjdtH7aF3RgLS3O3vyGrg-nUYBi-_kKPrLiQ$  but
> thought I'd reach out to the mailing list on this one.  It seems that
> Groovy 4 is including private fields as properties, which affects my
> own Grails application in multiple ways:
>
> 1. databinding (DataBindingLazyMetaPropertyMap in Grails) uses
> .properties to decide what to bind
> 2. json serialization is trying to serialize private fields that are
> recursive datastructures (Grails's Errors object).
>
> It seems this was fixed in Groovy 5 under
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/GROOVY-10438__;!!GFN0sa3rsbfR8OLyAw!fZIzdacaMb2b19GYD9RTQgd1vL7DxEEknudlIj-_Tb9374PSrRrWqZUbjdtH7aF3RgLS3O3vyGrg-nUYBi-_GJRYfa0$  but this wasn't
> back ported to Groovy 4.  It also appears that this was reported under
> Groovy 4 via https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/GROOVY-10555__;!!GFN0sa3rsbfR8OLyAw!fZIzdacaMb2b19GYD9RTQgd1vL7DxEEknudlIj-_Tb9374PSrRrWqZUbjdtH7aF3RgLS3O3vyGrg-nUYBi-_cERjHiw$  but it
> wasn't fixed.
>
> Can @Groovy_Developers  help me understand why this wasn't backported?
>  Is it possible we could get this fixed in 4.0.30?
>
> Regards,
> James