Nested Fluent Builders

Builders have become commonplace in current Java code. They have the effect of transforming the following code:

new Foo(1, 5, "abc", false);

Into something like

Foo.builder()
  .count(1)
  .priority(5)
  .name("abc")
  .canonical(true)
  .build();

This has the advantage of being much easier to understand (as a downside we can mention the fact that – depending on the implementation – it can result in the creation of an additional object). The implementation of such builders is very simple – they a list of “setters” which return the current object:

public final class FooBuilder {
  private int count = 1;
  // ...
 
  public FooBuilder count(int count) {
    this.count = count;
    return this; 
  }
 
  public Foo build() {
    return new Foo(count, //...
  }
}

Of course writing even this code can become repetitive and annoying, in which case we can use Lombok or other code generation tools. An other possible improvement – which makes builder more useful for testing – is to add methods like random as suggested in this Java Advent Calendar article. We can subclass the builder (into FooTestBuilder for example) and only use the “extended” version in testing.

What can do however if our objects are more complex (they have non-primitive fields)? One approach may look like this:

Foo.builder()
  .a(1)
  .b(2)
  .bar(Bar.builder().c(1).build())
  .buzz(Buzz.builder().build())
  .build();

We can make this a little nicer by overloading the bar / buzz methods to accept instances of BarBuilder / BuzzBuilder, in which case we can omit two build calls. Still, I longed for something like the following:

Foo.builder()
  .a(1)
  .b(2)
  .bar()
     .c(1).build()
  .buzz()
     .build()
  .build();

The idea is that the bar / buzz calls call start a new “context” where we initialize the Bar/Buzz classes. “build” calls end the innermost context, with the last build returning the initialized Foo object itself. How can this be written in a typesafe / compiler verifiable way?

My solution is the following:

• Each builder is parameterized to return an arbitrary type T from its build method
• The actual return value is generated from a Sink of T
• When using the builder at the top level, we use an IdentitySink with just returns the passed in value.
• When using the builder in a nested context, we use a Sink which stores the value and returns the builder from “one level up”.

Some example code to clarify the explanation from above can be found below. Note that this code has been written as an example and could be optimized (like making using a single instance of the IdentitySink, having FooBuilder itself implementing the sink methods, etc).

Implementation of a leaf-level builder:

interface Sink<T> {
  T setBar(Bar bar);
}
 
final class Bar {
  // ...
  public static BarBuilder<Bar> builder() {
    return new BarBuilder<Bar>(new Sink<Bar>() {
      @Override
      public Bar setBar(Bar bar) { return bar; }
    });
  }
}
 
class BarBuilder<T> {
  // ...
 
  protected BarBuilder(Sink<T> sink) {
    this.sink = sink;
  }
 
  // ...
 
  public T build() {
    return sink.setBar(new Bar(c, d, fizz));
  }
}

Implementation of the root level builder: 

class FooBuilder {
  // ...
  public BarBuilder<FooBuilder> setBar() {
    return new BarBuilder(new Sink<FooBuilder>() {
      @Override
      public Bar setBar(Bar bar) { 
        FooBuilder.this.bar = bar;
        return FooBuilder.this;
      }
    });
  }
 
  // ...
}

Conclusion: Java has some missing features (liked named parameters or the ease of reuse provided by duck-typing). We can work around them however nicely with some carefully crafted code (and we can put repeating code into code generators to avoid having to write it over and over again). In exchange we get a very versatile and good performing cross-platform runtime.