Picocli: Specify default value for an option which has a type of Map

Issue

I have an option like so

    @CommandLine.Option(names  "-D", description  "Define a symbol.")
    /* A list of defines provided by the user. */
    Map<String, String> defines  new LinkedHashMap<String, String>();

This does work when I do the following:

-Dkeyvalue

however when I do this

-Dkey

it does not work. Is there a way to add in a default value for keys which do not have a value associated with them?

Solution

Update: from picocli 4.6, this can be accomplished by specifying a mapFallbackValue in the option or positional parameter.

@Option(names  {"-P", "--properties"}, mapFallbackValue  Option.NULL_VALUE)
Map<String, Optional<Integer>> properties;

@Parameters(mapFallbackValue "INFO", description "... ${MAP-FALLBACK-VALUE} ...")
Map<Class<?>, LogLevel> logLevels;

The value type may be wrapped in a java.util.Optional. (If it isn’t, and the fallback value is Option.NULL_VALUE, picocli will put the value null in the map for the specified key.)

(Original answer follows below):

This can be accomplished with a custom parameterConsumer. For example:

/* A list of defines provided by the user. */
@Option(names  "-D", parameterConsumer  MyMapParameterConsumer.class,
  description  "Define a symbol.")
Map<String, String> defines  new LinkedHashMap<String, String>();

… where MyMapParameterConsumer can look something like this:

class MyMapParameterConsumer implements IParameterConsumer {
    @Override
    public void consumeParameters(
            Stack<String> args, 
            ArgSpec argSpec, 
            CommandSpec commandSpec) {

        if (args.isEmpty()) {
            throw new ParameterException(commandSpec.commandLine(), 
                    "Missing required parameter");
        }
        String parameter  args.pop();
        String[] keyValue  parameter.split("", 1);
        String key  keyValue[0];
        String value  keyValue.length > 1 
                ? keyValue[1]
                : "MY_DEFAULT";
        Map<String, String> map  argSpec.getValue();
        map.put(key, value);
    }
}

Answered By – Remko Popma