how to convert Java Map to read it in Kotlin? - kotlin

Question

I am facing some very basic problem (that never faced in java before) and might be due my lack of knowledge in Kotlin.
I am currently trying to read a YML file. So Im doing it in this way:
private val factory = YamlConfigurationFactory(LinkedHashMap::class.java, validator, objectMapper, "dw")
Best on Dropwizard guide for configurations.
https://www.dropwizard.io/1.3.12/docs/manual/testing.html
So later in my function I do this"
val yml = File(Paths.get("config.yml").toUri())
var keyValues = factory.build(yml)
When using my debugger I can see there is a Map with key->values, just as it should be.
now when I do keyValues.get("my-key")
type inference failed. the value of the type parameter k should be mentioned in input types
Tried this but no luck
var keyValues = LinkedHashMap<String, Any>()
keyValues = factory.build(yml)
The YamlConfigurationFactory requires a class to map to, but I dont know if there is a more direct way to specify a Kotlin class than with the current solution +.kotlin, like
LinkedHashMap::class.java.kotlin
Here it also throws an error.
Ideas?

Answer 1

Well, this is a typical problem with JVM generics. Class<LinkedHashMap> carries no info on what are the actual types of its keys and values, so the keyValues variable always ends up with the type LinkedHashMap<*, *> simply because it can't be checked at compile time. There are two ways around this:
Unsafe Cast
This is how you would deal with the problem in standard Java: just cast the LinkedHashMap<*, *> to LinkedHashMap<String, Any> (or whatever is the actual expected type). This produces a warning because the compiler can't verify the cast is safe, but it is also generally known such situations are often unavoidable when dealing with JVM generics and serialisation.
YamlConfigurationFactory(LinkedHashMap::class.java, ...) as LinkedHashMap<String, Any>
Type Inference Magic
When using Kotlin, you can avoid the cast by actually creating instance of Class<LinkedHashMap<String, Any>> explicitly. Of course, since this is still JVM, you lose all the type info at runtime, but it should be enough to tell the type inference engine what your result should be. However, you'll need a special helper method for this (or at least I haven't found a simpler solution yet), but that method needs to be declared just once somewhere in your project:
inline fun <reified T> classOf(): Class<T> = T::class.java
...
val factory = YamlConfigurationFactory(classOf<LinkedHashMap<String, Any>>(), ...)
Using this "hack", you'll get an instance of LinkedHashMap directly, however, always remember that this is just extra info for the type inference engine but effectively it just hides the unsafe cast. Also, you can't use this if the type is not known at compile type (reified).