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Builder Pattern in Java

I have been reading Effective Java by Joshua Bloch and learned something new so I wanted to try it out.

Making long parameter lists in your constructor is not fun and prone to errors. Previously I thought that best way to handle this situation was to make a bunch of setter methods. This can get kind of tedious and hard to follow when there are alot of parameters:

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Address myaddress = new Address("Chicago", "IL");
myaddress.setZip("44422");

Using a Builder object:

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Address myaddress = new Address.Builder().city("Chicago").state("IL").zip("44422").build();

Using a builder class allows you to specify params in any order too!

The required parameters are set in the Builder constructor:

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public void testBuilderDefaults() {
  Address expected = new Address.Builder("Chicago", "IL").build();
  assertEquals("State is IL", "IL", expected.getState());
  assertEquals("City is Chicago", "Chicago", expected.getCity());
}

then the optional params are chained to that:

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public void testBuilderStreetStateZip() {
  Address expected = new Address.Builder("Chicago", "IL")
                                       .street("this is an address").zip("11111").build();
  assertEquals("Address is this is an address", "this is an address", expected.getStreet());
  assertEquals("Zip is 11111", "11111", expected.getZip());
  assertEquals("State is IL", "IL", expected.getState());
  assertEquals("City is Chicago", "Chicago", expected.getCity());
}

The book goes into more discussion that I haven’t quite wrapped my head around yet, but this is interesting stuff .. even though it is java ;)