Let's say I have the following class:
class Person(val firstName:String, val lastName:String)
Is there an automatic way to generate xml from this class without having to hand create a toXml() method? Ideally the output would be something like:
<Person>
<firstName>John</firstName>
<lastName>Smith</lastName>
</Person>
It seems like there should be a way to do this without having to write all that out manually. Perhaps there is a trait I haven't found yet?
For case classes (or other subclasses of Product), this was once very easy to write generically: the name can be retrieved with productPrefix, all values are iterable via productIterator and the names of the fields via productElementName.
Unfortunately, productElementName has only had a very short life: it was added in revision 20958 and removed in revision 21223, apparently because it added too much weight to case classes (there's also an open ticket for it).
Unfortunately, I don't think there is such a magic trait. You could use something like XStream to accomplish this. However, it doesn't seem print all Scala classes that pretty automatically, so you probably need to write your own converter. Someone else has already done so in the case of Lists, I guess for your example you might need something similar.
Related
Let's say I have a non-sealed trait, Foo, and throughout my code I define some Objects that extend Foo.
Is there a way that I can, at compile time, look up all objects that extend Foo and print out some information about them (like printing out a string literal I have in a val?)
If so, how? If not, why not?
Seems like an obscure feature to have and it has problems since a lot of times only a few pieces of your code are re-compiled (and it only get's worse with libraries and dependencies). If I where you, I would just "find in files" for extends Foo or with Foo and check the results. You can even do a small script with regex to extract your val for each result if you are willing to do that work.
We are pretty familiar with implicits in Scala for now, but macros are pretty undiscovered area (at least for me) and, despite the presence of some great articles by Eugene Burmako, it is still not an easy material to just dive in.
In this particular question I'd like to find out if there is a possibility to achieve the analogous to the following code functionality using just macros:
implicit class Nonsense(val s: String) {
def ##(i:Int) = s.charAt(i)
}
So "asd" ## 0 will return 'a', for example. Can I implement macros that use infix notation? The reason to this is I'm writing a DSL for some already existing project and implicits allow making the API clear and concise, but whenever I write a new implicit class, I feel like introducing a new speed-reducing factor. And yes, I do know about value classes and stuff, I just think it would be really great if my DSL transformed into the underlying library API calls during compilation rather than in runtime.
TL;DR: can I replace implicits with macros while not changing the API? Can I write macros in infix form? Is there something even more suitable for this case? Is the trouble worth it?
UPD. To those advocating the value classes: in my case I have a little more than just a simple wrapper - they are often stacked. For example, I have an implicit class that takes some parameters, returns a lambda wrapping this parameters (i.e. partial function), and the second implicit class that is made specifically for wrapping this type of functions. I can achieve something like this:
a --> x ==> b
where first class wraps a and adds --> method, and the second one wraps the return type of a --> x and defines ==>(b). Plus it may really be the case when user creates considerable amount of objects in this fashion. I just don't know if this will be efficient, so if you could tell me that value classes cover this case - I'd be really glad to know that.
Back in the day (2.10.0-RC1) I had trouble using implicit classes for macros (sorry, I don't recollect why exactly) but the solution was to use:
an implicit def macro to convert to a class
define the infix operator as a def macro in that class
So something like the following might work for you:
implicit def toNonsense(s:String): Nonsense = macro ...
...
class Nonsense(...){
...
def ##(...):... = macro ...
...
}
That was pretty painful to implement. That being said, macro have become easier to implement since.
If you want to check what I did, because I'm not sure that applies to what you want to do, refer to this excerpt of my code (non-idiomatic style).
I won't address the relevance of that here, as it's been commented by others.
I found this code example in Programming in Scala, 2nd Ed. (Chapter 25, Listing 25.11):
object PrefixMap extends {
def empty[T] = ...
def apply[T](kvs: (String, T)*): PrefixMap[T] = ...
...
}
Why is the extends clause there without a superclass name? It looks like extending an anonymous class, but for what purpose? The accompanying text doesn't explain or even mention this construct anywhere. The code actually compiles and apparently works perfectly with or without it.
OTOH I found the exact same code on several web pages, including this (which looks like the original version of the chapter in the book). I doubt that a typo could have passed below the radars of so many readers up to now... so am I missing something?
I tried to google it, but struggled even to find proper search terms for it. So could someone explain whether this construct has a name and/or practical use in Scala?
Looks like a print error to me. It will work all the same, though, which probably helped hide it all this time.
Anyway, that object is extending a structural type, though it could also be an early initialization, if you had with XXX at the end. MMmmm. It looks more like an early initialization without any class or trait to be initialized later, actually... structure types do not contain code, I think.
At my work we use a typical heavy enterprise stack of Hibernate, Spring, and JSF to handle our application, but after learning Scala I've wanted to try to replicate much of our functionality within a more minimal Scala stack (Squeryl, Scalatra, Scalate) to see if I can decrease code and improve performance (an Achilles heal for us right now).
Often my way of doing things is influenced by our previous stack, so I'm open to advice on a way of doing things that are closer to Scala paradigms. However, I've chosen some of what I do based on previous paradigms we have in the Java code base so that other team members will hopefully be more receptive to the work I'm doing. But here is my question:
We have a domain class like so:
class Person(var firstName: String, var lastName: String)
Within a jade template I make a call like:
.section
- view(fields)
The backing class has a list of fields like so:
class PersonBean(val person: Person) {
val fields: Fields = Fields(person,
List(
Text(person.firstName),
Text(person.lastName)
))
}
Fields has a base object (person) and a list of Field objects. Its template prints all its fields templates. Text extends Field and its Jade template is supposed to print:
<label for="person:firstName">#{label}</label>: <input type="text" id="person:firstName" value="#{value}" />
Now the #{value} is simply a call to person.firstName. However, to find out the label I reference a ResourceBundle and need to produce a string key. I was thinking of using a naming convention like:
person.firstName.field=First Name
So the problem then becomes, how can I within the Text class (or parent Field class) discover what the parameter being passed in is? Is there a way I can pass in person.firstName and find that it is calling firstName on class Person? And finally, am I going about this completely wrong?
If you want to take a walk on the wild side, there's a (hidden) API in Scala that allows you to grab the syntax tree for a thunk of code - at runtime.
This incantation goes something like:
scala.reflect.Code.lift(f).tree
This should contain all the information you need, and then some, but you'll have your work cut out interpreting the output.
You can also read a bit more on the subject here: Can I get AST from live scala code?
Be warned though... It's rightly classified as experimental, do this at your own risk!
You can never do this anywhere from within Java, so I'm not wholly clear as to how you are just following the idiom you are used to. The obvious reason that this is not possible is that Java is pass-by-value. So in:
public void foo(String s) { ... }
There is no sense that the parameter s is anything other than what it is. It is not person.firstName just because you called foo like:
foo(person.firstName);
Because person.firstName and s are completely separate references!
What you could do is replacing the fields (e.g. firstname) with actual objects, which have a name attribute.
I did something similiar in a recent blog post:http://blog.schauderhaft.de/2011/05/01/binding-scala-objects-to-swing-components/
The property doesn't have a name property (yet), but it is a full object but is still just as easy to use as a field.
I would not be very surprised if the following is complete nonsense:
Make the parameter type of type A that gets passed in not A but Context[A]
create an implicit that turns any A into a Context[A] and while doing so captures the value of the parameter in a call-by-name parameter
then use reflection to inspect the call-by-name parameter that gets passed in
For this to work, you'd need very specific knowledge of how stuff gets turned into call-by-name functions; and how to extract the information you want (if it's present at all).
Yes, I know it's considered lazy by the non-Pythonistas. The reason I ask is that documentation is still woefully lacking in many Scala libraries (e.g. Scala-dbc, but that's not all I'm looking at), and if I could see the attributes of an object/class at runtime, I could at least figure out what's available. Thanks.
Scala does not have a reflection API. The only way to access this information is to use the Java reflection API. This has the disadvantage that the structure may change as the way Scala is represented in Java classes and interfaces may change in the future.
scala> classOf[AnyRef].getMethods
res0: Array[java.lang.reflect.Method] = Array(public final void ...
Some specific type information that is present in the byte code can be accessed with the ScalaSigParser.
import tools.scalap.scalax.rules.scalasig._
import scala.runtime._
val scalaSig = ScalaSigParser.parse(classOf[RichDouble])
That's one of my main uses for REPL. Type the object's name, dot, and then TAB and it will show all available methods.
It isn't perfect. For one thing, it shows protected methods, which won't be available unless you are extending the class. For another thing, it doesn't show methods available through implicit conversion.
And, of course, the IDEs are all capable of doing that.
You might want something like the following which would give you what you need. In this case, it operates on a String, obviously.
val testStr = "Panda"
testStr.getClass.getMethods.foreach(println)
Does that work?
You may want to use this little helper to beef up the REPL