Question

I’m using MultiMap from Google Guava 12 like this:

Multimap<Integer, OccupancyType> pkgPOP = HashMultimap.create();

after inserting values into this multimap, I need to return:

Map<Integer, Set<OccupancyType>>

However, when I do:

return pkgPOP.asMap();

It returns me

Map<Integer, Collection<OccupancyType>>

How can I return Map<Integer, Set<OccupancyType>> instead ?

Answer 1

Look at this issue and comment #2 by Kevin Bourrillion, head Guava dev:

You can double-cast the Map<K, Collection<V>> first to a raw Map and
then to the Map<K, Set<V>> that you want. You’ll have to suppress an
unchecked warning and you should comment at that point, “Safe because
SetMultimap guarantees this.” I may even update the SetMultimap
javadoc to mention this trick.

So do unchecked cast:

@SuppressWarnings("unchecked") // Safe because SetMultimap guarantees this.
final Map<Integer, Set<OccupancyType>> mapOfSets = 
    (Map<Integer, Set<OccupancyType>>) (Map<?, ?>) pkgPOP.asMap();

EDIT:

Since Guava 15.0 you can use helper method to do this in more elegant way:

Map<Integer, Set<OccupancyType>> mapOfSets = Multimaps.asMap(pkgPOP);