When attempting to retrieve a value from a Map which doesn’t exist, often it is desirable for the Map to provide an initial value. This saves the developer adding in extra logic to detect, create and insert the initial value. Java 8 adds a new Map method… java.util.Map::computeIfAbsent.
This is the second part in our java.util.Map series. The first part is here: 8 Visual Steps to HashMap Enlightenment
java.util.Map::computeIfAbsent(K key, Function mappingFunction) has the following properties:
- The second argument takes a function, which is called when there is no value for the key. The function is called to construct, insert and return the new value.
- If a new value is constructed, this is performed atomically, so that the function will only ever be used at most once for each key
This method is particularly useful when used in a concurrent context i.e. java.util.concurrent.ConcurrentHashMap::computeIfAbsent. Before this method was available it was necessary to provide external synchronization, to ensure that overwrite problems didn’t occur. The following tutorial shows presents computeIfAbsent.
Step through computeIfAbsent in action
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