I have a DSL that looks like this:
aMethod {
"a name"
"another name"
"and a third name"
}
My Problem is that I'm unable to access the three string, because calling the closure only returns the last statement. I tried to override the constructor of String(char[] value) which is called when an anonymous String-statement occurs:
def original
// primitive way to get the String(char[])-constructor
String.class.constructors.each {
if(it.toString() == "public java.lang.String(char[])") {
original = it
}
}
// overriding the constructor
String.metaClass.constructor = { char[] value ->
def instance = original.newInstance(value)
// ... do some further stuff with the instance ...
println "Created ${instance}"
instance
}
// teststring to call String(char[] value)
"teststring"
Unfortunately it didn't work and I thought anyway that it is quite complicated.
Thank you for the comments. Actually it would be great to define everything without quotes. But: After having a dsl that can be translated to java objects I'd loved to have additional annotations in my language at development time. I want to annotate duplicate names and so on. The IDE's I know better, Intellij and Eclipse handle Strings "a name" as one PSI-Elements. Splitting these elements can be very inconvinient ... I guess. I think statements in a closure like aMethod {a name} would result in an interpretation like aMethod {a.name}. That would mean that instead of having a StringLiteral Psi "a name", I would have an Object-Psi and a MethodCall-Psi or something like that. I don't know, and my next goal is just "parsing/creating" my java objects. Are you sure that it is impossible to override the String-Constructor?
Is any constructor called when you have a groovy script with this content:
"hello World"
Related
I'm just starting to learn kotlin and ran into a problem:
I have a Person class that has two fields
-age (Int data type)
-name (data type String)
there is also a oldUp function where I pass a Person object and increment the object's age field by 10.
Before the end of the program ** I want to display the age of the object that was passed to oldUp **
However, age is not shown.
my code:
class Person(var name: String, var age: Int){
}
fun growOld(human: Person){
human.age+=10
}
fun main(args: Array<String>) {
var human = Person("Kitty",6)
growOld(human)
println(human)
}
If you want to print the age, you can just write: println(human.age).
In your example it might be cleaner to add the growOld method to your class so you can call it on the object. For example:
class Person(var name: String, var age: Int){
fun growOld() {
this.age += 10
}
}
fun main() {
var human = Person("Kitty", 6)
println(human.age) // prints 6
human.growOld()
println(human.age) // prints 16
println(human.name) // prints Kitty
}
The problem is you're trying to print the human object itself. Under the hood, this calls its toString() method - every class has one of these, because it's defined on the type all classes derive from. If you don't override it and provide a nice way to "pretty print" your object, it'll use the default implementation, which is basically a reference to the object in memory.
A lot of classes you use have a nice toString() implementation, e.g. if you print a List you get ["something", "that", "looks", "like", "this"]. But that behaviour needed to be coded in - and you need to do that for your Person class too!
So you can override the default implementation like this:
override fun toString(): String {
// return a String here
}
override means you're taking an existing function and writing your own version of it to use instead - if this doesn't match an existing function you can override, you'll get an error. You'll also get an error if you don't use the override keyword for a function that looks exactly like an existing one in a supertype - it's just to make sure you don't accidentally do the wrong thing. In IntelliJ you can do Ctrl+O to override existing functions if you like.
So you could do something like this:
// inside your Person class
override fun toString(): String {
return "Name: $name, age: $age"
}
and then when you use it in a print statement, or in a string (like "Details: $person" or val details = "Details: " + person) it will call that toString() method and get the string you produced.
Another way to approach this is to use a data class:
data class Person(var name: String, var age: Int)
A data class is a special kind of class where all your "data" goes in the constructor (as properties, either val or var), and then you get some boilerplate stuff for free which uses those properties (and only those properties). Things like an equals() and hashCode() implementation that uses that data - and the relevant thing here, it gives you a toString() implementation that pretty prints name and age. Try it out!
Data classes can be really handy for simple data objects like you have here - but in normal classes, overriding toString() yourself is the general way of doing things. And you can still override a data class's toString if you want - sometimes you might want a more complex representation, or nice formatting, or you might want to only include some properties and ignore others. You're in control of how it prints itself!
And if you just want to print the age property, or print anything at all using the data in your object, then you just need to do what Robin's answer says. You don't need a toString() implementation at all for that (and since this is how you usually use objects, often you won't need to write a toString for your own classes at all)
I would like to know if it is possible to retrieve the name of a variable.
For example if I have a method:
def printSomething(def something){
//instead of having the literal String something, I want to be able to use the name of the variable that was passed
println('something is: ' + something)
}
If I call this method as follows:
def ordinary = 58
printSomething(ordinary)
I want to get:
ordinary is 58
On the other hand if I call this method like this:
def extraOrdinary = 67
printSomething(extraOrdinary)
I want to get:
extraOrdinary is 67
Edit
I need the variable name because I have this snippet of code which runs before each TestSuite in Katalon Studio, basically it gives you the flexibility of passing GlobalVariables using a katalon.features file. The idea is from: kazurayam/KatalonPropertiesDemo
#BeforeTestSuite
def sampleBeforeTestSuite(TestSuiteContext testSuiteContext) {
KatalonProperties props = new KatalonProperties()
// get appropriate value for GlobalVariable.hostname loaded from katalon.properties files
WebUI.comment(">>> GlobalVariable.G_Url default value: \'${GlobalVariable.G_Url}\'");
//gets the internal value of GlobalVariable.G_Url, if it's empty then use the one from katalon.features file
String preferedHostname = props.getProperty('GlobalVariable.G_Url')
if (preferedHostname != null) {
GlobalVariable.G_Url = preferedHostname;
WebUI.comment(">>> GlobalVariable.G_Url new value: \'${preferedHostname}\'");
} else {
WebUI.comment(">>> GlobalVariable.G_Url stays unchanged");
}
//doing the same for other variables is a lot of duplicate code
}
Now this only handles 1 variable value, if I do this for say 20 variables, that is a lot of duplicate code, so I wanted to create a helper function:
def setProperty(KatalonProperties props, GlobalVariable var){
WebUI.comment(">>> " + var.getName()" + default value: \'${var}\'");
//gets the internal value of var, if it's null then use the one from katalon.features file
GlobalVariable preferedVar = props.getProperty(var.getName())
if (preferedVar != null) {
var = preferedVar;
WebUI.comment(">>> " + var.getName() + " new value: \'${preferedVar}\'");
} else {
WebUI.comment(">>> " + var.getName() + " stays unchanged");
}
}
Here I just put var.getName() to explain what I am looking for, that is just a method I assume.
Yes, this is possible with ASTTransformations or with Macros (Groovy 2.5+).
I currently don't have a proper dev environment, but here are some pointers:
Not that both options are not trivial, are not what I would recommend a Groovy novice and you'll have to do some research. If I remember correctly either option requires a separate build/project from your calling code to work reliable. Also either of them might give you obscure and hard to debug compile time errors, for example when your code expects a variable as parameter but a literal or a method call is passed. So: there be dragons. That being said: I have worked a lot with these things and they can be really fun ;)
Groovy Documentation for Macros
If you are on Groovy 2.5+ you can use Macros. For your use-case take a look at the #Macro methods section. Your Method will have two parameters: MacroContext macroContext, MethodCallExpression callExpression the latter being the interesting one. The MethodCallExpression has the getArguments()-Methods, which allows you to access the Abstract Syntax Tree Nodes that where passed to the method as parameter. In your case that should be a VariableExpression which has the getName() method to give you the name that you're looking for.
Developing AST transformations
This is the more complicated version. You'll still get to the same VariableExpression as with the Macro-Method, but it'll be tedious to get there as you'll have to identify the correct MethodCallExpression yourself. You start from a ClassNode and work your way to the VariableExpression yourself. I would recommend to use a local transformation and create an Annotation. But identifying the correct MethodCallExpression is not trivial.
no. it's not possible.
however think about using map as a parameter and passing name and value of the property:
def printSomething(Map m){
println m
}
printSomething(ordinary:58)
printSomething(extraOrdinary:67)
printSomething(ordinary:11,extraOrdinary:22)
this will output
[ordinary:58]
[extraOrdinary:67]
[ordinary:11, extraOrdinary:22]
It seems the groovy also support the compiling mode, using groovyc , If I run the following code with dynamic script calling way, I will get "String" method called.
Why I still got "String" even if I compiled the code using groovyc? The type of variable a is "Object", so I expected after compiling the code, I will get the "Object" function called.
Object a = "123"
def foo(Object a) {
println "Object"
}
def foo(String a) {
println "String"
}
foo(a)
Here is relevant section from groovy-docs
In Groovy, the methods which will be invoked are chosen at runtime.
This is called runtime dispatch or multi-methods. It means that the
method will be chosen based on the types of the arguments at runtime.
In Java, this is the opposite: methods are chosen at compile time,
based on the declared types.
There is a sample code in '2. Multi-methods' section, not copying here.
Finally mandatory link to MrHaki's groovy goodness page on this topic
Expanding on this blog post, I am trying to use a category to create a simple DSL for use with the javax.measure (JSR-275) classes (similar to TimeCategory for time intervals)
However, I do not want to add boilerplate code for each of the possible available methods (getMeter, getMilliMeter, getKelvin, getSecond etc.). I thought overriding the getProperty(String) method would work, but alas, it looks like the getProperty method defined in the category is not used when accessing the property directly.
Here is some simplified code to demonstrate:
import javax.measure.quantity.Length;
import javax.measure.unit.Unit;
import javax.measure.Measure;
#Category(Number)
class LengthCategory {
public Measure<BigDecimal, Length> getProperty(String unit){
return Measure.valueOf(this,Unit.valueOf(unit));
}
}
use(LengthCategory){
println 3.getProperty("m") // this works
println 3.m // this reports a non-exisiting property
prinlln 3.'m' // as does this
}
Assuming other methods of dynamically adding properties to a runtime object (e.g. Expando, subclassing GroovyInterceptible, mixins and other metaclass manipulations) is not viable and I would really rather not have to manually code getters for every possible unit and SI prefix combination. There are obviously other ways to go about creating a DSL for measurements, but I would still like to understand why this method would not work.
Could someone explain why the getProperty method of the category does not override .propertyName usage? I am obviously missing something important about the resolution of property names using the metaclass during runtime.
I don't know why getProperty doesn't work on categories. But you can define a get method on them that does basically the same (i think). This works:
#Category(Number)
class LengthCategory {
def get(String unit) {
"$this $unit"
}
}
use (LengthCategory) {
println 3.m // 3 m
println 3.'m' // 3 m
}
As far as I can tell, you can't actually extend Integers with full (i.e., readable and writable) properties using Category -- only with methods.
You can extend an Integer using read-only properties by using the method version of the property. You can even make it writable by including a set method. However, there doesn't seem to be a way to store the value passed in other than in a static variable and that ends up affecting all Integers.
Example:
$ cat catprop
#!/usr/local/bin/groovy
#Category(Integer)
class CatInteger {
private static String str = "default"
public static String setN(Integer i, String _str) { str = _str }
public static String getN(Integer i) { return str }
}
use (CatInteger) {
3.n = "333a"
println "3.n is " + 3.n
3.n = "333b"
println "3.n is " + 3.n
4.n = "444"
println "4.n is " + 4.n
println "3.n is " + 3.n
}
$ catprop
3.n is 333a
3.n is 333b
4.n is 444
3.n is 444
$
Note that in the last line 3.n return "444" because the stored field is static. I suppose that one could use a private HashMap and store a value for every Integer accessed, but that's too ugly to contemplate.
Another possibility would be to use the MetaClass Interface's getProperty() and setProperty(). However, I haven't looked into that so I don't know if it would work or not (just a thought).
Nice answer, but not sure, if you's still want to use JSR-275 now that JSR-363 is final?;-)
I'd like to re-implement a method of a Java class. For example, for "hi".length() to return 4. (How) Can I do that?
I know using SomeClass.metaClass I can get a reference to an existing method and define new (or overriding) method, but I can't seem to be able to do that for existing Java methods.
Using Groovy, you can replace any method (even those of final classes) with your own implementation. Method replacement in Groovy uses the meta-object protocol, not inheritance.
Here's the example you requested, i.e. how to make String.length() always return 4
// Redefine the method
String.metaClass.invokeMethod = { name, args ->
def metaMethod = delegate.metaClass.getMetaMethod(name, args)
def result = metaMethod.invoke(delegate, args)
name == 'length' ? 4 : result
}
// Test it
assert "i_do_not_have_4_chars".length() == 4
Seems like it could be possible by abusing String metaClass. But the attempt I've done so far in groovy console didn't led to the expected result :
def oldLength = String.metaClass.length
String.metaClass.length = { ->
return oldLength+10;
}
println "hi".length()
outputs the sad 2
I think you could take a look at Proxy MetaClass or Delegating metaClass.
If you did redefine it, it would only work in Groovy code. Groovy can't change the way Java code executes.
In Groovy, "hi".length() is roughly equivalent to this Java:
stringMetaClass.invokeMethod("hi","length");
Because Groovy doesn't actually call length directly, metaClass tricks work in Groovy code. But Java doesn't know about MetaClasses, so there is no way to make this work.
Although this question is very old I like to point out another way (at least for newer Groovy versions) .
The length() method in java.lang.String is implemented from java.lang.CharSequence interface. In order to reimplement the method using the String-metaClass you need to "override" the method in the metaClass of the interface first.
CharSequence.metaClass.length = { -> -1}
String.metaClass.length = { -> 4 }
assert "i_do_not_have_4_chars".length() == 4
The solution using String.metaClass.invokeMethod changes the behaviour of all String-methods and is problematic. For instance, simply invoking "asdf".size() leads to an exception on my setup.