My Shitty Code

Embracing the Messiness in Search of Epic Solutions

Guava: FluentIterable vs Collections2

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PROBLEM

Guava’s Collections2 is great when dealing with collections, but it quickly becomes rather clumsy and messy when we try to combine multiple actions together.

For example, say we have userIds, which is a collection of user IDs. For each user ID, we want to retrieve the Employee object and add it into an immutable set if the lookup is successful. So, we essentially want to perform a “tranform” and “filter” here.

By using strictly Collections2, we ended up with the following code:-

final ImmutableSet<Employee> employees = ImmutableSet.copyOf(
        Collections2.filter(
                Collections2.transform(userIds,
                                       new Function<String, Employee>() {
                                           @Override
                                           public Employee apply(String userId) {
                                               return employeeService.getEmployee(userId);
                                           }
                                       }),
                new Predicate<Employee>() {
                    @Override
                    public boolean apply(Employee employee) {
                        return employee != null;
                    }
                }));

While it works, it may be confusing to those reading the code due to the nested functions.

SOLUTION

A better approach is to use FluentIterable that allows us to write more natural top-to-bottom code:-

final ImmutableSet<Employee> employees = FluentIterable
        .from(userIds)
        .transform(new Function<String, Employee>() {
            @Override
            public Employee apply(String userId) {
                return employeeService.getEmployee(userId);
            }
        })
        .filter(new Predicate<Employee>() {
            @Override
            public boolean apply(Employee employee) {
                return employee != null;
            }
        })
        .toImmutableSet();

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