Using Futures in Scala? - scala

Question

I am trying to incorporate a database into my http-microservice.
The microservice has a function getValueFromInternet(val: Foo): Future[Value] which was being called by my microservice on a GET request. Now, I want it to happen such that, a function getValue(val: Foo): Future[Value] would first query a db and if the database returns no results, call getValueFromInternet. The database query returns a Future[Seq[Value2]] where I can convert Value2 to Value using a function. And if no entry is found corresponding to that value, an empty Vector is returned.
This is what I have tried so far:
def getValue(val: Foo): Future[Value] = {
val resultFuture = db.getValue(val)
// 1st attempt. Clearly wrong
resultFuture onComplete {
case Success(Vector()) => getValueFromInternet(val)
case Success(vec) => convertValue2to1(vec.head)
}
// 2nd attempt. This is also wrong
resultFuture match {
case Future(Success(Vector())) => getValueFromInternet(val)
case Future(Success(vec)) => convertValue2to1(vec.head)
}
}
I would be grateful for any help suggesting how I can do this.
I have implemented the database and microservice independently and you can find them here and here

Answer 1

You have to use flatMap, since the thing you want to do if the first operation does not return a result also returns a future.
This is as close to your code as possible while still compiling. Note that you can't have identifiers called val in scala, since that is a keyword.
def getValue(v: Foo)(implicit ec: ExecutionContext): Future[Value] = {
val resultFuture: Future[Seq[Value2]] = db.getValue(v)
resultFuture.flatMap { vec =>
if(vec.isEmpty)
getValueFromInternet(v)
else
Future.successful(convertValue2to1(vec.head))
}
}