Getters and Setters in Scala

In object oriented programming, getters and setters are something that most would agree have some real world benefits. Unfortunately, they can sometimes be annoying to write. They usually do not consist of a lot of code, but when you have the write the same thing over and over and over it gets old really fast. In my experience, most getters and setters are very much alike so it stands to reason that there must be a “better” way to accomplish the same result.

In some languages there is support of some kind of “missing_method” syntax that allows the language to dynamically create getters and setters just by looking at the name of the method that doesn’t exist in the object. For example, in ColdFusion, there exists an “onMissingMethod” method that, when included, automatically executes when a method does not exist. This onMissingMethod gets passed the method name that was trying to be accessed and any arguments passed in. Then, by inspecting the method name (lets say, setAge) the method type and property can be determined. From “setAge” it can be determined that the method is a setter and that it should set the property “age”.

Recently though I’ve done a lot of reading about and playing with Scala and I’ve found that it does things quite a bit different than ColdFusion, Java, and most other languages I’ve seen.

As a first example, lets see an example of a basic class definition in Scala.

class Person() {
 var name = ""
 var age = 0
}

At first glance you might think that this class only allows you to instantiate a person object but not anything more. But actually, once instantiated, you can set and get the properties by doing the following:

// Instantiate a person object
person = new Person()

// Print the object's age and name properties
println(person.age)
println(person.name)

To set the properties to different values you would do the following:

// Set the properties to different values
person.age = 34
person.name = "Dustin Martin"

Pretty simple so far. You might be thinking to yourself the same thing I thought when I saw an example like this: these aren’t getters and setters! And you are right, that is not what this is. This is simply retrieving the public properties directly from the object. In most languages this would be a very bad idea. What happens when you need to validate the age is in a certain range before it is set? What happens if you want to format the name in a particular way before returning it? In Java or other languages you would be in trouble right about now and probably kicking yourself for not taking the time to write getters and setters. If you wanted to switch from directly accessing the public properties to getters and setters you would either have to find some strange work-around or implement the getters and setters and change any code that access those properties directly to use the getters and setters instead.

In Scala though, it is no big deal to directly access public properties. You could easily change to using getters and setters by making a couple simple changes to your class.

class Person() {
 // Private age variable, renamed to _age
 private var _age = 0
 var name = ""

 // Getter
 def age = _age

 // Setter
 def age_= (value:Int):Unit = _age = value
}

What this code is doing is pretty simple. First, the variable “age” is renamed to “_age” and made private with the private keyword. Next, the getter is added by the line:

def age = _age

This code simply defines a method called “age” and returns the “_age” variable. Scala doesn’t require the return keyword but it would just have easily be written as:

def age = return _age

In addition to not requiring the return keyword, Scala doesn’t mandate the use of curly braces around a method body if the body consists of a single expression.

Next, a setter had to be added to set the new private variable.

def age_= (value:Int):Unit = _age = value

This line is a bit more tricky but I’ll explain. First, the method name is “age_=“. The underscore is a special character in Scala and in this case, allows for a space in the method name which essentially makes the name “age =”. The parentheses and contents dictate the value and type that needs to be passed in. The “:Unit” code is equivalent to returning void. The remaining code is setting the “_age” variable to “value”. These things allow the method to be used in the same way as directly accessing the public property.

person.age = 99

But wait! Where are the parentheses in this supposed method call?! In Scala, parentheses are usually optional. The previous line could just as easily been written as

person.age =(99)
// OR
person.age_=(99)

As you can see, Scala has some unconventional ideas that provide a solid, well thought out, and an abbreviated syntax to access object properties.