Collector Variants

[Paul Sandoz]

On Jul 21, 2013, at 8:19 PM, Richard Warburton <richard.warburton at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> partitioningBy and groupingBy both have a variant with a  default
> downstream collector, eg:
> 
> public static <T, K> Collector<T, ?, Map<K, List<T>>>
> groupingBy(Function<? super T, ? extends K> classifier)
> 
> Is there any reason why there is no such equivalent for mapping?

Some reasons IIRC:

- simply to reduce the number of methods. 

- the "telescoping" is applied to collectors more likely to be used at the top-level returning a Map where List is the value type, whereas mapping is more likely to be used at a sub-level, since a map(mapper).collect(downstream) could, and preferably should, be used instead. 

- if mapping has a default toList downstream collector then map(mapper).collect(toList()) and collect(mapping(mapper)) do the same thing. 

Personally i prefer mapping as is so as not to encourage top-level usage at the expense of being slightly more verbose in multi-level case.

Paul.
 
>  It would
> seem to be a fairly common use case (at least from my Collector usage).
> Especially given that I seem to be using mapping as a downstream collector
> for groupingBy or partitioningBy rather than anything else.  In which case
> why not have the 'leaf' collection default be the same?
> 
> regards,
> 
>  Dr. Richard Warburton
> 
>  http://insightfullogic.com
>  @RichardWarburto <http://twitter.com/richardwarburto>
>