Allow Java code generation to use nested method invocations

I do not currently see a way to generate the following Java code:

Builder.newBuilder().setId("example-dependency");

I can produce the following multi-line version

Builder builder = Builder.newBuilder();
builder.setId("example-dependency");

but in reality the fluent call chain I am trying to generate is like 9 calls long and I don’t want to produce this multi-statement style code.

This limitation stems from the fact that JavaMethodInvocation target can only be a String class name. I would like to add the ability to have its target optionally be another JavaMethodInvocation.

Example code:

new JavaMethodInvocation(
	new JavaMethodInvocation("com.example.Builder", "newBuilder")),
	"setId", "example-dependeny"));

[snicoll]

what were you envisioning?

Thanks for asking. I can’t really say without spending some time investigating. My plan was to open up the API a bit so that other forms of writer could be provided. So something where you’d define the type and still offer a way to add annotations on the fly via a customizer but where methods could be provided by another form.

We don’t want a hard dependency on Javapoet or any other library so that would work in the form of a strategy interface where we’d provide a JavaPoet implementation (and therefore an optional dependency on it).

From that perspective, I don’t think that the fact we have to support all languages is necessarily true. For languages where such third party library does not exist, we’d stick with the limitation of the current implementation (and/or we would improve it).

At the end of the day, custom instances that need to write “complex” java code in Java (or Kotlin) could simply create a ProjectContributor that does that using JavaPoet directly and not rely on any of the code writer API of this project.

[onobc]

I started looking into this briefly @snicoll and Javapoet does seem promising. Its pretty slick. I am continuing to look into it - just giving a bit of status.