Support optionalSetTo or setToOptional

[jedesah]

I think it would be useful to have a version of setTo which accepts an Option and only changes the object if the value being passed in is Some.

[stanch]

Speaking of this, I was also wondering if the following feature would be useful:

// map
Person(35).modify(_.age).setToM(List(20, 28)) shouldEqual
  List(Person(20), Person(28))

// flatMap
List(Person(35)).modify(_.each.age).setToM(List(20, 28)) shouldEqual
  List(Person(20), Person(28))

I will probably implement it and send a PR if I like it.

[adamw]

Maybe it would be enough to locally pimp the PathModify and use its members: obj and doModify to implement both an optional/replicating modification?

[stanch]

Monadic modification is really useful, for example, given a Monad[Gen] and a QuicklensFunctor[Gen], one can use that in conjunction with ScalaCheck:

val genValidPerson: Gen[Person] =
  Gen.const(Person("John", 30))

val genInvalidPersonAge: Gen[Person] =
  genValidPerson.modify(_.each.age).setToM(Gen.oneOf(-1, 0))

forAll(genInvalidPersonAge) { person =>
  // should be invalid
}

[stanch]

Of course this can also be added on top in other ways, e.g. using monadic workflows:

val genValidPerson: Gen[Person] =
  Gen.const(Person("John", 30))

val genInvalidPersonAge: Gen[Person] = monadic[Gen] {
  genValidPerson.each.modify(_.age).setTo(Gen.oneOf(-1, 0).each)
}

forAll(genInvalidPersonAge) { person =>
  // should be invalid
}

But I think it does not work with closures, so it wouldn’t be possible to emulate usingM(f: A => M[A]).

[adamw]

But that would add a dependency on scalaz's/cat's/... Monad implementation?

[adamw]

Though I really like the example with quickcheck :)

[stanch]

IMHO scalaz/cats will add too much weight to this library. The idea was to add QuicklensMonad and let the users define their own instances (they can also define a bridge to scalaz/cats and get the instances for free). Alternatively the bridge can live in a separate module like quicklens-scalaz.

[adamw]

Definitely, adding scalaz/cats dependency would be way too much :)

I'm not at all happy having to define yet another XxxFunctor trait, but I guess there are no better options for now. That's why I'd like to avoid defining yet another Monad trait, and while the use-case is compelling, I think I would sway towards using an implicit class to extend PathModify with whatever monad implementation is available locally.

Maybe it would be good to document the approach instead of coding?

[stanch]

This seems fair, although the said functionality might as well be a library. Would you be interested in a PR with that as a separate module (“project” in SBT terms)?

[adamw]

Sure, a separate module sounds good as well :)