Never Again Forget to Call .execute() in jOOQ

jOOQ’s DSL, like any fluent API, has one big caveat. It’s very easy to forget to call .execute(). And when you do, chances are, you’re going to be staring at your code for minutes, because everything looks perfect:

ctx.insertInto(T)
   .columns(T.A, T.B)
   .values(1, 2);

Staring… staring… staring… Why is it not inserting that row?

“Aaaah, not again!!”

This is how it’s done:

ctx.insertInto(T)
   .columns(T.A, T.B)
   .values(1, 2)
   .execute();

In principle, this kind of mistake can happen with any fluent API. E.g. StringBuilder

sb.append("a").append("b"); // Not consuming the result

Or streams:

Stream.of(1, 2).peek(System.out::println); // Not so much peeking

But it usually doesn’t happen as much, because the difference to jOOQ is that

• jOOQ’s DML statements (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, MERGE) and DDL statements (CREATE, ALTER, DROP, TRUNCATE), and a few other produce a side effect
• That side effect is the only thing we care about. The result (the update count) is mostly irrelevant

And as such, we don’t care about the result of execute(), which is an int. No one forgets to call fetch() on a jOOQ ResultQuery:

ctx.select(T.A, T.B)
   .from(T); // Well duh

Because without calling fetch() or something similar, we’re not getting any results, and we want the results, just like with the StringBuilder or the Stream. But we don’t want the execute() result.

As such, even we, when writing jOOQ’s integration tests, occasionally forget to call this silly little method.

No more!

When it happened again this week…

10 minutes trying to figure out why my JOOQ insert didn't seem to be working…

… had forgotten `.execute()`

… fuckin' stunning colleague over here

— r͍̣̼ͯ̑ͪò̜b̹ ̽ͦfͤ͐l̫̺̙et̘̯̫́̃͐c͙̪̤ͧ̏ͩh̙͗er͒̔ (@_fletchr) March 25, 2021

… I finally created an issue to think about it: https://github.com/jOOQ/jOOQ/issues/11718. And I created an issue to wonder if JetBrains could do something about it: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-265263

And they already can! Apart from the org.jetbrains.annotations.Contract annotation, which is there for precisely this reason, apparently, it’s also possible to mimick the JSR-305 @CheckReturnValue annotation on every method “whose return value needs to be checked” (i.e. a method that has no side effect, or whose side effect is to mutate only “this“).

I added this annotation, I added it to all the relevant jOOQ API, which was a bit of yak shaving (https://github.com/jOOQ/jOOQ/commit/f2b529a2305f8c5f8d037776687887a5acd50b11) and voilà

As you can see, IntelliJ now warns the user whenever they forget to consume the result of any of jOOQ’s DSL methods (by calling execute(), passing it to some method that consumes it, etc.)

Thanks again to Tagir Valeev from JetBrains for walking me through this and even improving the @Contract annotation, which jOOQ might use in a future version.

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