Simplified try-catch strategy in DataWeave with the default keyword (instead of try/orElse)

Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash.

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In this post:

• The question

• The answer

• My takeaway

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The other day I was reading some StackOverflow DataWeave questions (as one does) and I got to this very interesting thread: Why the “default” keyword acts like “try + catch / orElse” in some cases. I wanted to take a moment to create an article about my own explanation of what I see in that thread. I already created a video about it, so, I might as well create a blog post too :)

P.S. You can try out the scripts in the DataWeave Playground or in Visual Studio Code.

The question

In summary, Harshank Bansal notices that if you try to run the following script, you will receive an error message stating that ABC cannot be coerced to Number (which is expected).

Script:

%dw 2.0
output application/json
---
"ABC" as Number

Output:

Cannot coerce String (ABC) to Number

4| "ABC" as Number
   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Trace:
  at main::main (line: 4, column: 1)

Maybe your first instinct to try to fix this code - if you’re familiar with the try function - would be to do a script similar to the one Harshank mentions in the question:

%dw 2.0
import * from dw::Runtime
output application/json
---
try(() -> ("ABC" as Number)) orElse "Invalid number"

This correctly catches the error and outputs the “Invalid number” string instead. However, Harshank found an alternative for this specific use case which is using the default keyword. Like so:

%dw 2.0
output application/json
---
("ABC" as Number) default "Invalid number"

This previous script outputs the exact same “Invalid number” string as we did with the try function. However, this seems a bit weird since the default keyword is mainly used for null values and this is an error.

Now let’s talk about the answer/explanation that Mariano de Achaval wrote on why this behavior happens.

The answer

If you don’t know who Mariano is, he’s one of the architects that started developing DataWeave years ago. That’s why his answer is a big deal :)

Mariano mentions that the default keyword can be used for two things:

1. When the left-side value is null, the right-side value is returned.

2. To handle some exceptions like the coercion one we saw at the beginning of the post.

Notice how I wrote some in bold there, that’s because Mariano and Harshank both mention it doesn’t work for all possible exceptions. It only works when:

1. You call a function that doesn’t support null.

2. You try to coerce a value to a data type (like the example we saw).

Now, it is worth mentioning that this behavior is available to use but it is not recommended (as Mariano wrote). It is better to use the try function instead.

My takeaway

Even though it’s not recommended to use, it doesn’t hurt to know it exists :)

Sometimes you need to do a quick script where you need to ensure the type coercion doesn’t return an exception (like Harshank’s example) and the code isn’t really too complex to add the try function.

What is your takeaway from this??

-alex