Kotlin Factory Class with Generic outputs - kotlin

Question

I'm in the process of trying to port some code I wrote in Java over to Kotlin and I'm struggling mightily with some issues around generics. I quite commonly use a factory pattern in Java to return an instance of a generic interface that I want to call for a given type.
In Java I had this contract:
public Message<T extends Action> {
private List<T> actions;
..some other properties
}
And this interface:
public interface MessageConverter<T extends Action, M extends BaseModel> {
List<M> convertMessage(Message<T> message);
DataType getDataType();
}
And lastly this factory:
public class MessageConverterFactory {
//This gets populated via DI
private Map<DataType, MessageConverter> converterMap;
public <T extends Action, M extends BaseModel> MessageConverter<T, M> getMessageConverter(DataType dataType) {
return converterMap.get(dataType);
}
}
With all that in place, I was able to do things like this:
Message<T> message = mapper.readValue(messageString, type);
MessageConverter<T, M> messageConverter = messageConverterFactory.getMessageConverter(dataType);
List<M> dataModels = messageConverter.convertMessage(message);
I understand that I was abusing raw generic types in Java to an extent to make this happen, but I assumed there would be some way to still do a generic factory pattern like this.
However, no matter with I try with generic variance, star projections, etc. I cannot get Kotlin to accept any version of this code. The closest I got was down to the invocation of the generic converter's convertMessage call. It was failing because I was using star projections and attempting to restrict the type of T, but that was leading to the compiler thinking convertMessage accepts Message<Nothing>.
Is code like this possible in Kotlin? Or is there a similar alternative approach I should be using instead?
Thanks,
Jeff

Answer 1

The literal conversion of this to Kotlin is pretty simple, and the Java-to-Kotlin converter built in to IDEA would spit something like this out almost directly, given the equivalent Java code:
class Message<T: Action> {
private val actions: List<T> = TODO()
...
}
interface MessageConverter<T: Action, out M: BaseModel> {
fun convertMessage(message: Message<T>): List<M>
val dataType: DataType
}
class MessageConverterFactory(val converterMap: Map<DataType, MessageConverter<*, *>>) {
fun <T: Action, M: BaseModel> getMessageConverter(dataType: DataType): MessageConverter<T, M> {
return converterMap[dataType] as MessageConverter<T, M>
}
}
Note, the cast in getMessageConverter -- your Java code is doing the equivalent, without being explicit about it -- I believe the compiler would even spit out a warning about an unchecked assignment.
An alternative in Kotlin is to use an inline function with reified types to return the appropriate converter. For example, something like this:
inline fun <reified T: Action, reified M: BaseModel> converterOf(): MessageConverter<T, M> = when {
T::class == FooAction::class, M::class == BarModel::class -> TODO()
else -> error("No converter available for type ${T::class.simpleName} to ${M::class.simpleName}")
}