Code & Control Flow

Most of KotlinPoet’s API uses immutable Kotlin objects. There’s also builders, method chaining and varargs to make the API friendly. KotlinPoet offers models for Kotlin files (FileSpec), classes, interfaces & objects (TypeSpec), type aliases (TypeAliasSpec), properties (PropertySpec), functions & constructors (FunSpec), parameters (ParameterSpec) and annotations (AnnotationSpec).

But the body of methods and constructors is not modeled. There’s no expression class, no statement class or syntax tree nodes. Instead, KotlinPoet uses strings for code blocks, and you can take advantage of Kotlin’s multiline strings to make this look nice:

val main = FunSpec.builder("main")
  .addCode("""
    |var total = 0
    |for (i in 0..<10) {
    |    total += i
    |}
    |""".trimMargin())
  .build()

Which generates this:

fun main() {
  var total = 0
  for (i in 0..<10) {
    total += i
  }
}

There are additional APIs to assist with newlines, braces and indentation:

val main = FunSpec.builder("main")
  .addStatement("var total = 0")
  .beginControlFlow("for (i in 0..<10)")
  .addStatement("total += i")
  .endControlFlow()
  .build()

This example is lame because the generated code is constant! Suppose instead of just adding 0 to 10, we want to make the operation and range configurable. Here’s a method that generates a method:

private fun computeRange(name: String, from: Int, to: Int, op: String): FunSpec {
  return FunSpec.builder(name)
    .returns(Int::class)
    .addStatement("var result = 1")
    .beginControlFlow("for (i in $from..<$to)")
    .addStatement("result = result $op i")
    .endControlFlow()
    .addStatement("return result")
    .build()
}

And here’s what we get when we call computeRange("multiply10to20", 10, 20, "*"):

fun multiply10to20(): kotlin.Int {
  var result = 1
  for (i in 10..<20) {
    result = result * i
  }
  return result
}

Methods generating methods! And since KotlinPoet generates source instead of bytecode, you can read through it to make sure it’s right.