Option as a singleton collection - real life use cases - scala

Question

The title pretty much sums it up. Option as a singleton collection can sometimes be confusing, but sometimes it allows for an interesting application. I have one example on top of my head, and would like to learn more of such examples.
My only example is running for comprehension on the Option[List[T]]. We can do the following:
val v = Some(List(1, 2, 3))
for {
list <- v.toList
elem <- list
} yield elem + 1
Without having Option.toList, it wouldn't be possible to stay in the same for comprehension, and I'd be forced to write something like this:
for {
list <- v
} yield for {
elem <- list
} yield elem + 1
The first example is cleaner, and it's an advantage of Option being a collection. Of course, the result type will be different in these 2 examples, but let's assume it doesn't matter for the sake of discussion.
Any other examples? I'd especially like to concentrate on collection-like usage, and not usage of Option's monadic properties - those are pretty much obvious. In other words, map and flatMap functions are out of scope of this question. They're definitely very useful, just coming from elsewhere.

Answer 1

I find that working with Option[T] as a collection's main benefit is that you get to use operations defined on a collection, such as map, flatmap, filter, foreach etc. This makes it easier to do operations on a given option, instead of using pattern matching or checking Option[T].isDefined to see if a value exists.
For example, let's take the user repository example from Daniel Westheide blog post about Option[T]:
Say you have a UserRepository object which returns users based on their ID. The user may or may not exist, hence it returns an Option[Person]. Now let's say we want to search a person by id and then filter their age. We can do:
val age: Some[Int] = UserRepository.findById(1).map(_.age)
Now let's say that a Person also has a gender property of type Option[String]. If you wanted to extract that out, you could use map:
val gender: Option[Option[String]] = UserRepository.findById(1).map(_.gender)
But working with nested options isn't too convenient. For that, you have flatMap:
val gender: Option[String] = UserRepository.findById(1).flatMap(_.gender)
And if we want to print out the gender if it exists, we can use foreach:
gender.foreach(println)
You'll find yourself working with scala types that have nested Option[T] fields defined and it's really handy to have collection like methods which help you remove out boilerplate and noise for extracting the actual value out of the operation.
A more real life use case I just encountered the other day was working with the awscala SDK, where I wanted to retrieve an object from S3 storage:
val bucket: Option[Bucket] = s3.bucket(amazonConfig.bucketName)
val result: Option[S3Object] = bucket.flatMap(_.get(amazonConfig.offsetKey))
result.flatMap(s3Object =>
Source.fromInputStream(s3Object.content).mkString.decodeOption[Array[KafkaOffset]])
So what happens here is that you query the S3 service for a bucket, which may or may not exist. Then, you want to extract an S3Object out of it which actually contains the data, but the API itself returns an Option[S3Object], so it's handy to use flatMap to flat out get an Option[S3Object] instead of Option[Option[S3Object]]. Finally, I want to deserialize the S3Object which actually contains a JSON, and using the Argonaut library, it returns an Option[MyObject], so then again using flatMap to the rescue of extracting the inner option type.
Edit:
As you pointed out, map and flatMap belong to the monadic property of Option[T]. I've written a blog post describing the reduction of two options where the final solution was:
def reduce[T](a: Option[T], b: Option[T], f: (T, T) => T): Option[T] = {
(a ++ b).reduceLeftOption(f)
}
Which takes advantage of the ++ operator defined on any collection which is also specifically defined on Option[T], being a collection.

Answer 2

I'd suggest to take a look at the corresponding chapter of The Neophyte's Guide to Scala.
In my experience, most useful use-cases of Option-as-collection are to filter an option and to make flatMap that implicitly filters None values.