Scala 101 - OOP : Getters & Setters

This is a part of my Scala tutorial . Read the first part & second part for a more general Scala intro. You can read here for an overview of how to write a class in Scala.

Let’s say we have the following class:

class Fish {
   var name = "Default Name"
}

scala> var jaws = new Fish
jaws: Fish = Fish@8191a42
scala> jaws.name
res29: java.lang.String = Default Name
scala> jaws.name = "Jaws"
scala> jaws.name
res30: java.lang.String = Jaws

Now , let’s say you’ve decided you need to limit access to the name parameter vis a setter and a getter. How would those functions look like? Well , if you come from Java , like me , you would probably do something like this (after adding the”private” modifier to the variable):

And then you can use it like this:

scala> var jaws = new Fishjaws: Fish = Fish@1f619137
scala> jaws.getName
res32: java.lang.String = Default
scala> jaws.setName("Jaws")
scala> jaws.getName
res34: java.lang.String = Jaws

Problem Solved ? Well , this solution will work , but it’s crappy. Why is it crappy?

• You broke your api
• If you want to avoid breaking the api , you have to have getters/setters from step one - which is a lot of unnecessary code , and it’s really not very elegant.
• It’s much less convenient then the previous way.

So here comes Scala to the rescue: First , lets change the field name from”name” to”myName”. Now , the Getter : lets create a function called”name” that will return the value of”myName”. It fairly easy:

//Getter
def name = myName

You don’t have to use”return” in Scala , and if it’s a one-liner , you can drop the {}  , so we get a lovely little function that we can use like this :

scala> jaws.name
res30: java.lang.String = Jaws

Now for the setter. What we would like to do is keep the convenient field access - if we can get the name by using”jaws.name” , it would be great if we could have a function that will enable us to do this :

jaws.name = "Jaws"

I bet you’re thinking “Yeah , and grandma can fly” . Well, she can! You see , in Scala , you can have a space in the name of the function. Let me repeat that  a space in the function name. So actually , we can write a function whose name is: “name =” . Stop looking a me like this, it works The magic little thing is , as always in Scala , _ . So this is our setter:

//Setter
def name_= (newName: String) = myName = newName

The _ stands for a space , and now we can have this class :

and we can do this:

scala> var jaws = new Fishjaws: Fish = Fish@8191a42
scala> jaws.name
res29: java.lang.String = Default Name
scala> jaws.name = "Jaws"
scala> jaws.name
res30: java.lang.String = Jaws

I knew you’d like it