Scala Option object inside another Option object

Question

I have a model, which has some Option fields, which contain another Option fields. For example:

case class First(second: Option[Second], name: Option[String])
case class Second(third: Option[Third], title: Option[String])
case class Third(numberOfSmth: Option[Int])

I'm receiving this data from external JSON's and sometimes this data may contain null's, that was the reason of such model design.

So the question is: what is the best way to get a deepest field?

First.get.second.get.third.get.numberOfSmth.get

Above method looks really ugly and it may cause exception if one of the objects will be None. I was looking in to Scalaz lib, but didn't figure out a better way to do that.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The solution is to use Option.map and Option.flatMap:

First.flatMap(_.second.flatMap(_.third.map(_.numberOfSmth)))

Or the equivalent (see the update at the end of this answer):

First flatMap(_.second) flatMap(_.third) map(_.numberOfSmth)

This returns an Option[Int] (provided that numberOfSmth returns an Int). If any of the options in the call chain is None, the result will be None, otherwise it will be Some(count) where count is the value returned by numberOfSmth.

Of course this can get ugly very fast. For this reason scala supports for comprehensions as a syntactic sugar. The above can be rewritten as:

for { 
  first <- First
  second <- first .second
  third <- second.third
} third.numberOfSmth

Which is arguably nicer (especially if you are not yet used to seeing map/flatMap everywhere, as will certainly be the case after a while using scala), and generates the exact same code under the hood.

For more background, you may check this other question: What is Scala's yield?

UPDATE: Thanks to Ben James for pointing out that flatMap is associative. In other words x flatMap(y flatMap z))) is the same as x flatMap y flatMap z. While the latter is usually not shorter, it has the advantage of avoiding any nesting, which is easier to follow.

Here is some illustration in the REPL (the 4 styles are equivalent, with the first two using flatMap nesting, the other two using flat chains of flatMap):

scala> val l = Some(1,Some(2,Some(3,"aze")))
l: Some[(Int, Some[(Int, Some[(Int, String)])])] = Some((1,Some((2,Some((3,aze))))))
scala> l.flatMap(_._2.flatMap(_._2.map(_._2)))
res22: Option[String] = Some(aze)
scala> l flatMap(_._2 flatMap(_._2 map(_._2)))
res23: Option[String] = Some(aze)
scala> l flatMap(_._2) flatMap(_._2) map(_._2)
res24: Option[String] = Some(aze)
scala> l.flatMap(_._2).flatMap(_._2).map(_._2)
res25: Option[String] = Some(aze)