This Week in Cats: Alternative

Let’s say I have two methods that return Either and I just want to take the first successful result, only defaulting to the error return if both fail. For example, each method is going to look at different fields of a request body and if the required fields are present, build an object.

trait Credential
case class CredType1(username: String, password: String) extends Credential
case class CredType2(token: String) extends Credential

case class ReqBody(username: Option[String], password: Option[String], token: Option[String])

def maybeCredType1(req: ReqBody): Either[Throwable, Credential] =
  Applicative[Option]
    .map2(req.username, req.password)(CredType1)
    .map(Right(_))
    .getOrElse(Left(new Exception("Cred1 requires both a username and password")))

def maybeCredType2(req: ReqBody): Either[Throwable, Credential] =
  req.token
    .map(value => Right(CredType2(value)))
    .getOrElse(Left(new Exception("Cred2 requires a token")))

I could write some additional logic that calls the correct method based on the values in ReqBody but then I'd be duplicating the logic about which fields are required for which implementation of Credential. This is where we want to call both and take the first success. There are a number of ways I could implement that, pattern matching, for comprehension, nested maps, but as I suspected this is a solved problem. Cats defines the <+> operator to implement this kind of alternative matching behavior.

def extractCredential(req: ReqBody): Either[Throwable, Credential] =
  maybeCredType1(req) <+> maybeCredType2(req)


extractCredential(ReqBody(Some("uname"), Some("pword"), None)
// res1 = Right(CredType1("uname", "pword"))

extractCredential(ReqBody(None, None, Some("token"))
// res2 = Right(CredType2("token"))

extractCredential(ReqBody(Some("uname"), None, None))
// res3 = Left(Throwable("Cred1 requires both a username and password"))

extractCredential(ReqBody(Some("uname"), None, Some("token"))
// res4 = Left(CredType2("token"))

extractCredential(ReqBody(None, None, None))
// res5 = Left(Throwable("Cred1 requires both a username and password"))

Now we can keep the logic on which request values are required for the types of credentials inside individual constructor methods.