Question

Let’s say I have a case class that represents personas, people on different social networks. Instances of that class are fully immutable, and are held in immutable collections, to be eventually modified by an Akka actor.

Now, I have a case class with many fields, and I receive a message that says I must update one of the fields, something like this:

case class Persona(serviceName  : String,
                   serviceId    : String,
                   sentMessages : Set[String])

// Somewhere deep in an actor
val newPersona = Persona(existingPersona.serviceName,
                         existingPersona.serviceId,
                         existingPersona.sentMessages + newMessage)

Notice I have to specify all fields, even though only one changes. Is there a way to clone existingPersona and replace only one field, without specifying all the fields that don’t change? Can I write that as a trait and use it for all my case classes?

If Persona was a Map-like instance, it would be easy to do.

Answer 1

case classcomes with a copy method that is dedicated exactly to this usage:

val newPersona = existingPersona.copy(sentMessages = 
                   existingPersona.sentMessages + newMessage)