So I have a class:
case class Document (idx: String, name: String, code: String)
Due to some transformations, an object which was initially created as Document, now becomes of type Any.
val doc = Document("12", "anyName", "ps") // Ends up as type Any
So I want to convert it into type Document again.
I know that can be done like this:
val docNew = doc.asInstanceOf[Document]
But, what I am trying is to pass the type, in this case Document, as a parameter to make it more generic.
So I was trying the following:
val mType = Document
val docNew = doc.asInstanceOf[mType]
But Intellij says:
Cannot resolve symbol mType
Edit: My ultimate goal is to pass the parameter Document to a function, so at the end I could do something like:
def convertIntoDoc(doc: Any, mType: Type) = {
val docNew = doc.asInstanceOf[mType]
docNew
}
If you want to learn programming with Scala you have to learn about the difference between types and values.
Due to type-erasure type parameters never actually make it into your program. In reality, types only exist to help you write good code.
If you go down this road you will eventually realise that asInstanceOf[T] does not actually do anything.
You might think this is weird and with type-erasure the type system is superfluous, but let me assure you it is perfectly useful and when it comes to more complicated code actually becomes the stepping stone to generic programming, e.g. code that can be used in many different ways due to type parametrisation.
To spin this a little further you should almost never end up with a val of type Any because you will loose this additional safety net of static typing. This means you have already made a mistake somewhere upstream in your code.
Your ultimate goal is simple to achieve:
def convertIntoDoc[MType](doc: Any) = {
val docNew = doc.asInstanceOf[MType]
docNew
}
You just have to remember that MType is a type and not a variable. So it has to be used as type parameter and not as value parameter.
The problem is that casting an Any into a MType will get you ClassCastExceptions (when running your program!) if you use the wrong type.
asInstanceOf is very dangerous because it kind of overwrites the type safety that the Scala compiler provides.
If you have any questions about this let me know.
The correct way to convert your Any to Document is to use match:
val docNew = doc match { case d: Document => d }
This is safe because it will throw a MatchException if for some reason the object is not of type Document.
Your convertIntoDoc function is just a wrapper around asInstanceOf, so you need to give more detail on what this function is intended to do (preferably in a separate question).
instead of val you can use type
type mType = Document
val docNew = doc.asInstanceOf[mType]
For the second part of the question, you can pass the type using type parameter as argument
def convertIntoDoc[A](doc: Any) = {
val docNew = doc.asInstanceOf[A]
docNew
}
Related
Let's say I have a map stored on disk and I should like to retrieve it:
type myType = Map[something , somethingElse]
...
try{
val bytes = Files.readAllBytes(path)
val is = new ObjectInputStream(new ByteArrayInputStream(bytes))
val m = is.readObject().asInstanceOf[myType]
Some(m)
}catch{
case _:FileNotFoundException | _:IOException | _:ClassCastException => None
}
So far so good. However, as Maps are generic and due to the ever-annoying type erasure, I doubt I can conveniently rely on the ClassCastException to make sure that if I ever change myType, outdated maps will be discarded.
The thought has crossed my mind to simply hash myType and to retrieve and compare the hash prior to retrieving the map, but that feels more like a workaround than a solution. What would be the proper way to handle this?
Edit:
The maps were stored to disk as follows:
var myMap : myType = ...
...
try{
val b = new ByteArrayOutputStream()
val os = new ObjectOutputStream(b)
os.writeObject(myMap)
Files.write(path, b.toByteArray)
}catch{
...
}
Have you looked into Manifests?
There is a good topic on here that explores getting around type erasure already: How do I get around type erasure on Scala? Or, why can't I get the type parameter of my collections?
Serializing any generic type in Java/Scala will suffer from type erasure.
There is a way to go around this using reflection and ClassTags (backed up with implicit conventions) but it assumes that the compiler has access to the initial types to be preserved. In the case of de-serializing an object from cold-storage, the compiler has no access to the initial type and it won't be able to help you.
Doing something similar to what you describe might be the way to go.
I have this weird requirement where data comes in as name ->value pair from a service and all the name-> value type is string only (which really they are not but that's how data is stored)
This is a simplified illustration.
case class EntityObject(type:String,value:String)
EntityObject("boolean","true")
now when getting that EntityObject if type is "boolean" then I have to make sure value is not anything else but boolean so first get type out and check value and cast value to that type. e.g in this case check value is boolean so have to cast string value to boolean to validate. If it was anything else besides boolean then it should fail.
e.g. if data came in as below, casting will fail and it should report back to the caller about this error.
EntityObject("boolean","1")
Due to this weird requirement it forces type conversion in validation code which doesn't look elegant and against type safe programming. Any elegant way to handle this in scala (may be in a more type safe manner)?
Here is where I'm going to channel an idea taken from a tweet by Miles Sabin in regards to hereogenous mappings (see this gist on github.) If you know the type of object mapping names a head of time you can use a nifty little trick which involves dependent types. Hold on, 'cause it's a wild ride:
trait AssocConv[K] { type V ; def convert: String => V }
def makeConv[V0](name: String, con: String => V0) = new AssocConv[name.type]{
V = V0
val convert = con
}
implicit val boolConv = makeConv("boolean", yourMappingFunc)
def convEntity(name: String, value: String)(implicit conv: AssocConv[name.type]): Try[conv.V] = Try{ conv.convert(value) }
I haven't tested this but it "should" work. I've also enclosed it in a Scala Try so that it catches exceptions thrown by your conversion function (in case you're doing things like _.toInt as the converter.)
You're really talking about conversion, not casting. Casting would be if the value really were an instance of Boolean at runtime, whereas what you have is a String representation of a Boolean.
If you're already working with a case class, I think a pattern matching expression would work pretty well here.
For example,
def convert(entity : EntityObject) : Any = entity match {
case EntityObject("boolean", "true") => true
case EntityObject("boolean", "false") => false
case EntityObject("string", s) => s
// TODO: add Regex-based matchers for numeric types
}
Anything that doesn't match one of the specified patterns would cause a MatchError, or you could put a catchall expression at the end to throw your own exception.
In this particular example, since the function returns Any, the calling coffee would need to do an actual type cast to get the specific type, but at least by that point all validation/conversion would have already been performed. Alternatively, you could just put the code that uses the values directly into the above function and avoid casting. I don't know what your specific needs are, so I can't offer anything more detailed.
The following code fails for me:
object Message {
def parse[T](bsonDoc: BSONDocument): Try[T] = {
implicit val bsonHandler = Macros.handler[T]
bsonDoc.seeAsTry[T]
}
}
Message.parse[messages.ClientHello](data)
The error is:
No apply function found for T
implicit val bsonHandler = Macros.handler[T]
^
However, if I hardcode a type (one of my case classes), it's fine:
object Message {
def parse(bsonDoc: BSONDocument): Try[ClientHello] = {
implicit val bsonHandler = Macros.handler[ClientHello]
bsonDoc.seeAsTry[ClientHello]
}
}
Message.parse(data)
So I presume this is a problem using generics. Incidentally, I have to import messages.ClientHello. If I just use messages.ClientHello I get:
not found: value ClientHello
implicit val bsonHandler = Macros.handler[messages.ClientHello]
^
How can I achieve what I'm trying to do, which is to have a single method that will take a BSON document and return an instance of the appropriate case class?
1) Macro applications get expanded immediately when encountered (well, modulo some fine details of type inference that are irrelevant here). This means that when you write handler[T], handler will try to expand with T as a type parameter. This won't lead to anything good, hence the error. To make this work, you need to turn Message.parse into a macro itself.
2) This happens because ReactiveMongo macros are unhygienic. Specifically, https://github.com/ReactiveMongo/ReactiveMongo/blob/v0.10.0/macros/src/main/scala/macros.scala#L142 isn't going to work correctly in situations like yours, because it uses simple name of the class, not a fully qualified name. I think the best way to make the macro work correctly would be using Ident(companion), not Ident(companion.name) - that would ensure that this identifier binds to the companion, not to something in scope having the same name.
I've been working with Scala Macros and have the following code in the macro:
val fieldMemberType = fieldMember.typeSignatureIn(objectType) match {
case NullaryMethodType(tpe) => tpe
case _ => doesntCompile(s"$propertyName isn't a field, it must be another thing")
}
reify{
new TypeBuilder() {
type fieldType = fieldMemberType.type
}
}
As you can see, I've managed to get a c.universe.Type fieldMemberType. This represents the type of certain field in the object. Once I get that, I want to create a new TypeBuilder object in the reify. TypeBuilder is an abstract class with an abstract parameter. This abstract parameter is fieldType. I want this fieldType to be the type that I've found before.
Running the code shown here returns me a fieldMemberType not found. Is there any way that I can get the fieldMemberType to work inside the reify clause?
The problem is that the code you pass to reify is essentially going to be placed verbatim at the point where the macro is being expanded, and fieldMemberType isn't going to mean anything there.
In some cases you can use splice to sneak an expression that you have at macro-expansion time into the code you're reifying. For example, if we were trying to create an instance of this trait:
trait Foo { def i: Int }
And had this variable at macro-expansion time:
val myInt = 10
We could write the following:
reify { new Foo { def i = c.literal(myInt).splice } }
That's not going to work here, which means you're going to have to forget about nice little reify and write out the AST by hand. You'll find this happens a lot, unfortunately. My standard approach is to start a new REPL and type something like this:
import scala.reflect.runtime.universe._
trait TypeBuilder { type fieldType }
showRaw(reify(new TypeBuilder { type fieldType = String }))
This will spit out several lines of AST, which you can then cut and paste into your macro definition as a starting point. Then you fiddle with it, replacing things like this:
Ident(TypeBuilder)
With this:
Ident(newTypeName("TypeBuilder"))
And FINAL with Flag.FINAL, and so on. I wish the toString methods for the AST types corresponded more exactly to the code it takes to build them, but you'll pretty quickly get a sense of what you need to change. You'll end up with something like this:
c.Expr(
Block(
ClassDef(
Modifiers(Flag.FINAL),
anon,
Nil,
Template(
Ident(newTypeName("TypeBuilder")) :: Nil,
emptyValDef,
List(
constructor(c),
TypeDef(
Modifiers(),
newTypeName("fieldType"),
Nil,
TypeTree(fieldMemberType)
)
)
)
),
Apply(Select(New(Ident(anon)), nme.CONSTRUCTOR), Nil)
)
)
Where anon is a type name you've created in advance for your anonymous class, and constructor is a convenience method I use to make this kind of thing a little less hideous (you can find its definition at the end of this complete working example).
Now if we wrap this expression up in something like this, we can write the following:
scala> TypeMemberExample.builderWithType[String]
res0: TypeBuilder{type fieldType = String} = $1$$1#fb3f1f3
So it works. We've taken a c.universe.Type (which I get here from the WeakTypeTag of the type parameter on builderWithType, but it will work in exactly the same way with any old Type) and used it to define the type member of our TypeBuilder trait.
There is a simpler approach than tree writing for your use case. Indeed I use it all the time to keep trees at bay, as it can be really difficult to program with trees. I prefer to compute types and use reify to generate the trees. This makes much more robust and "hygienic" macros and less compile time errors. IMO using trees must be a last resort, only for a few cases, such as tree transforms or generic programming for a family of types such as tuples.
The tip here is to define a function taking as type parameters, the types you want to use in the reify body, with a context bound on a WeakTypeTag. Then you call this function by passing explicitly the WeakTypeTags you can build from universe Types thanks to the context WeakTypeTag method.
So in your case, that would give the following.
val fieldMemberType: Type = fieldMember.typeSignatureIn(objectType) match {
case NullaryMethodType(tpe) => tpe
case _ => doesntCompile(s"$propertyName isn't a field, it must be another thing")
}
def genRes[T: WeakTypeTag] = reify{
new TypeBuilder() {
type fieldType = T
}
}
genRes(c.WeakTypeTag(fieldMemberType))
I'd like to write a type alias to shorten, nice and encapsulated Scala code.
Suppose I got some collection which has the property of being a list of maps, the value of which are tuples.
My type would write something like List[Map[Int, (String, String)]], or anything more generic as my application allows it. I could imagine having a supertype asking for a Seq[MapLike[Int, Any]] or whatever floats my boat, with concrete subclasses being more specific.
I'd then want to write an alias for this long type.
class ConcreteClass {
type DataType = List[Map[Int, (String, String)]]
...
}
I would then happily use ConcreteClass#DataType everywhere I can take one, and use it.
Now suppose I add a function
def foo(a : DataType) { ... }
And I want to call it from outside with an empty list.
I can call foo(List()), but when I want to change my underlying type to be another type of Seq, I'll have to come back and change this code too. Besides, it's not very explicit this empty list is intended as a DataType. And the companion object does not have the associated List methods, so I can't call DataType(), or DataType.empty. It's gonna be even more annoying when I need non-empty lists since I'll have to write out a significant part of this long type.
Is there any way I can ask Scala to understand my type as the same thing, including companion object with its creator methods, in the interest of shortening code and blackboxing it ?
Or, any reason why I should not be doing this in the first place ?
The answer was actually quite simple:
class ConcreteClass {
type DataType = List[String]
}
object ConcreteClass {
val DataType = List
}
val d = ConcreteClass.DataType.empty
This enables my code to call ConcreteClass.DataType to construct lists with all the methods in List and little effort.
Thanks a lot to Oleg for the insight. His answer is also best in case you want not to delegate to List any call to ConcreteClass.DataType, but control precisely what you want to allow callers to do.
What about this?
class ConcreteClass {
type DataType = List[String]
}
object DataType {
def apply(): ConcreteClass#DataType = Nil
}
//...
val a = DataType()