Let's say that I have a lot of similar data classes. Here's an example class User
which is defined as follows:
case class User (name: String, age: Int, posts: List[String]) {
val numPosts: Int = posts.length
...
def foo = "bar"
...
}
I am interested in automatically creating a method (at compile time) that returns a Map
in a way that each field name is mapped to its value when it is called in runtime. For the example above, let's say that my method is called toMap
:
val myUser = User("Foo", 25, List("Lorem", "Ipsum"))
myUser.toMap
should return
Map("name" -> "Foo", "age" -> 25, "posts" -> List("Lorem", "Ipsum"), "numPosts" -> 2)
How would you do this with macros?
Here's what I have done: First, I created a Model
class as a superclass for all of my data classes and implemented the method in there like this:
abstract class Model {
def toMap[T]: Map[String, Any] = macro toMap_impl[T]
}
class User(...) extends Model {
...
}
Then I defined a macro implementation in a separate Macros
object:
object Macros {
import scala.language.experimental.macros
import scala.reflect.macros.Context
def getMap_impl[T: c.WeakTypeTag](c: Context): c.Expr[Map[String, Any]] = {
import c.universe._
val tpe = weakTypeOf[T]
// Filter members that start with "value", which are val fields
val members = tpe.members.toList.filter(m => !m.isMethod && m.toString.startsWith("value"))
// Create ("fieldName", field) tuples to construct a map from field names to fields themselves
val tuples =
for {
m <- members
val fieldString = Literal(Constant(m.toString.replace("value ", "")))
val field = Ident(m)
} yield (fieldString, field)
val mappings = tuples.toMap
/* Parse the string version of the map [i.e. Map("posts" -> (posts), "age" -> (age), "name" -> (name))] to get the AST
* for the map, which is generated as:
*
* Apply(Ident(newTermName("Map")),
* List(
* Apply(Select(Literal(Constant("posts")), newTermName("$minus$greater")), List(Ident(newTermName("posts")))),
* Apply(Select(Literal(Constant("age")), newTermName("$minus$greater")), List(Ident(newTermName("age")))),
* Apply(Select(Literal(Constant("name")), newTermName("$minus$greater")), List(Ident(newTermName("name"))))
* )
* )
*
* which is equivalent to Map("posts".$minus$greater(posts), "age".$minus$greater(age), "name".$minus$greater(name))
*/
c.Expr[Map[String, Any]](c.parse(mappings.toString))
}
}
Yet I get this error from sbt when I try to compile it:
[error] /Users/emre/workspace/DynamoReflection/core/src/main/scala/dynamo/Main.scala:9: not found: value posts
[error] foo.getMap[User]
[error] ^
Macros.scala is being compiled first. Here is the snippet from my Build.scala:
lazy val root: Project = Project(
"root",
file("core"),
settings = buildSettings
) aggregate(macros, core)
lazy val macros: Project = Project(
"macros",
file("macros"),
settings = buildSettings ++ Seq(
libraryDependencies <+= (scalaVersion)("org.scala-lang" % "scala-reflect" % _))
)
lazy val core: Project = Project(
"core",
file("core"),
settings = buildSettings
) dependsOn(macros)
What am I doing wrong? I think that the compiler tries to evaluate the field identifiers too when it creates the expression, but I don't know how to return them properly in the expression. Could you show me how to do that?
Thanks very much in advance.