Passing Optional.absent() values to methods concisely

Question

One problem with using Guava\'s Optional type as arguments of methods is that you can\'t simply write

// method declaration
public void foo(Optional         


        

Answer 1

If you are dealing with a small set of Optional<> types (e.g., mostly strings or a handful of other types), just create some helper methods that bind the type argument for you:

public final class AbsentValues {
    public static Optional absentString() {
        return Optional.absent();
    }
}

You can even import these statically to result in cleaner code:

import static AbsentValues.*;

...

foo(absentString());

For less common Optional<> types, just specify the type argument explicitly. It may not be pretty, but it's correct.