Boolean Operators for Options

Options in scala are very useful and help you explicitly specify if your methods might return no value (where you would return null in Java) and when parameters are optional.

For instance, you might have a REST endpoint with something like this:

def users(nameFilter: Option[String], cityFilter: Option[String])

Option are usually managed with match, map and flatMap, or for comprehensions. But imagine you want to do a simple test, to know if you have at least one filter, match would be cumbersome, as you will have to define loads of cases. But you can do this with a simple test:

val withFilter = nameFilter.isDefined || cityFilter.isDefined

If you start doing this with many Options, you end up with a lot of isDefined and your code becomes a bit less readable than it could be. Wouldn't it be good if you could just do: nameFilter || cityFilter, after all Options are very similar to Booleans, they are either "true" (defined), or not.

With scala implicit conversion, this is very simple, we can just convert option to Boolean:

implicit def optToBool(opt: Option[_]): Boolean = opt.isDefined

This will give:

Some(10) || None         //> res0: Boolean = true
Some(10) || Some(20)  //> res1: Boolean = true
None || Some(20)         //> res2: Boolean = true
None || None                //> res3: Boolean = false

Some(10) && Some(20)  //> res4: Boolean = true
Some(10) && None         //> res5: Boolean = false
None && Some(20)        //> res6: Boolean = false
None && None               //> res7: Boolean = false