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  4. Scala: Setting a default value

Scala: Setting a default value

Mark Needham user avatar by
Mark Needham
·
Jun. 13, 11 · Interview
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We wanted to try and generate a build label to use for the name of the artifacts archive that gets generated each time we run the build but wanted to default it to a hard coded value if the system property representing the build label wasn’t available.

In Ruby we would be able to do something like this:

buildLabel =  ENV["GO_PIPELINE_LABEL"] || "LOCAL"

There isn’t a function in Scala that does that so we initially ended up with this:

  def buildLabel() = [{ 
System.getenv("GO_PIPELINE_LABEL") match {
case null => "LOCAL"
case label => label
}
}

My colleague Mushtaq suggested passing the initial value into an Option like so…

def buildLabel() = {
Option(System.getenv("GO_PIPELINE_LABEL")).getOrElse("LOCAL")
}

…which I think is pretty neat!

I tried to see what the definition of an operator to do it the Ruby way would look like and ended up with the following:

class RichAny[A](value:A ) {                              
def || (default:A ) = { Option(value).getOrElse(default) }
}
implicit def any2RichAny[A <: AnyRef](x: A) = new RichAny(x)

Which we can use like so:

def buildLabel() = {
System.getenv("GO_PIPELINE_LABEL") || "LABEL"
}

I imagine that’s probably not the idiomatic Scala way to do it so I’d be curious to know what is.

From http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2011/06/12/scala-setting-a-default-value/

Scala (programming language)

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