Question

In clojure, I would like to create a record inside a function.

I tried:

(defn foo []
  (defrecord MyRecord [a b])
  (let [b (MyRecord. "1" "2")]))

But it causes an exception:

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Unable to resolve classname: MyRecord

Any idea?

Answer 1

The key points

You should only use defrecord at top level.¹

So, if you do need a custom record type, you should define it outside of foo (at some point in your code which gets processed before foo‘s definition).

Otherwise, you could just use a regular map. In particular, if foo will be creating entities of multiple “types” (at the conceptual level), it probably makes no sense to try to create a record type (a Java class) for each; the natural solution would be to use maps holding a :type key to indicate the sort of entity represented.

Why it doesn’t work

The code from the question doesn’t compile, because Clojure’s compiler resolves class names mentioned as first arguments to new forms at compile time. ((MyRecord. "1" "2") is expanded to (new MyRecord "1" "2") during the macro expansion process.) Here the name MyRecord cannot yet be resolved to the appropriate class, because the latter has not yet been defined (it would be created by the defrecord form after foo was first called).

To get around this, you could do something horrible like

(defn foo []
  (eval '(defrecord MyRecord [x y]))
  (let [b (clojure.lang.Reflector/invokeConstructor
           ;; assuming MyRecord will get created in the user ns:
           (Class/forName "user.MyRecord")
           (into-array Object ["1" "2"]))]
    b))

which causes a kitten to have its finalize method invoked through reflection, resulting in a gruesome death.

As a final remark, the above horrible version would sort of work, but it would also create a new record type under the same name at each invocation. This causes weirdness to ensue. Try the following examples for a flavour:

(defprotocol PFoo (-foo [this]))

(defrecord Foo [x]
  PFoo
  (-foo [this] :foo))

(def f1 (Foo. 1))

(defrecord Foo [x])

(extend-protocol PFoo
  Foo
  (-foo [this] :bar))

(def f2 (Foo. 2))

(defrecord Foo [x])

(def f3 (Foo. 3))

(-foo f1)
; => :foo
(-foo f2)
; => :bar
(-foo f3)
; breaks

;; and of course
(identical? (class f1) (class f2))
; => false
(instance? (class f1) f2)
; => false

At this point, (Class/forName "user.Foo") (assuming again that all this happens in the user namespace) returns the class of f3, of which neither f1 nor f2 is an instance.

---

¹ Macros occasionally might output a defrecord form wrapped in a do along with some other forms; top-level dos are special, though, in that they act as if the forms they wrap were individually processed at top level.