Java 8 List<T> into Map<K, V>

Question

I want to convert List of Objects to Map, where Map's key and value located as attributes inside Object in List.

Here Java 7 snippet of such convertation:

private Map<String, Child> getChildren(List<Family> families  ) {
        Map<String, Child> convertedMap = new HashMap<String, Child>();

        for (Family family : families) {
            convertedMap.put(family.getId(), family.getParent().getChild());
        }
        return convertedMap;
    }

Answer 1

It should be something similar to...

Map<String, Child> m = families.stream()
    .collect(Collectors.toMap(Family::getId, f -> f.getParent().getChild()));

Answer 2

Jason gave a decent answer (+1) but I should point out that it has different semantics from the OP's Java 7 code. The issue concerns the behavior if two family instances in the input list have duplicate IDs. Maybe they're guaranteed unique, in which case there is no difference. If there are duplicates, though, with the OP's original code, a Family later in the list will overwrite the map entry for a Family earlier in the list that has the same ID.

With Jason's code (shown below, slightly modified):

Map<String, Child> getChildren(List<Family> families) {
    return families.stream()
        .collect(Collectors.toMap(Family::getId, f -> f.getParent().getChild()));
}

the Collectors.toMap operation will throw IllegalStateException if there are any duplicate keys. This is somewhat unpleasant, but at least it notifies you that there are duplicates instead of potentially losing data silently. The rule for Collectors.toMap(keyMapper, valueMapper) is that you need to be sure that the key mapper function returns a unique key for every element of the stream.

What you need to do about this -- if anything -- depends on the problem domain. One possibility is to use the three-arg version: Collectors.toMap(keyMapper, valueMapper, mergeFunction) . This specifies an extra function that gets called in the case of duplicates. If you want to have later entries overwrite earlier ones (matching the original Java 7 code), you'd do this:

Map<String, Child> getChildren(List<Family> families) {
    return families.stream()
        .collect(Collectors.toMap(Family::getId, f -> f.getParent().getChild(),
                                                 (child1, child2) -> child2));
}

An alternative would be to build up a list of children for each family instead of having just one child. You could write a more complicated merging function that created a list for the first child and appended to this list for the second and subsequent children. This is so common that there is a special groupingBy collector that does this automatically. By itself this would produce a list of families grouped by ID. We don't want a list of families but instead we want a list of children, so we add a downstream mapping operation to map from family to child, and then collect the children into a list. The code would look like this:

Map<String, List<Child>> getChildren(List<Family> families) {
    return families.stream()
        .collect(Collectors.groupingBy(Family::getId,
                    Collectors.mapping(f -> f.getParent().getChild(),
                        Collectors.toList())));
}

Note that the return type has changed from Map<String, Child> to Map<String, List<Child>> .