Seals are not just sea mammals

A guide through Kotlin's 'sealed' keyword and what you can do with it.

The more time you spend using Kotlin, the more you are going to realize how magnificent of a language it actually is. I just recently hit a new “peak” of admiration for this language by discovering the sealed keyword.

Have a look at the code sample below:

We have a sealed class Response, representing the response from e.g. a network request and two data classes (Success & Error) derived from Response. At first glance, this looks like nothing more than a simple example of inheritance (and some mixed in generics), when in fact it is a very clever way of using actual classes (and the increased possibilities that go along with them) as enums.

Let’s spin this a little bit further:

The magic behind all this is the fact that Kotlin allows you to use sealed classes as cases for the when() statement - by doing so, the classes shown above are nothing more than a complex enum with added functionality.

The main() function above clearly shows the benefit of being able to create a function like print(response: Response) without having to worry about the actual type being passed to the function.

The output of the main function obviously looks as follows:

500
Request Successful

I hope this short post could give you a quick insight into the nature of Kotlin’s sealed keyword and will help you to write cleaner and easier maintainable code in the future.

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Inspired by the post of Piotr Ślesarew on medium.com