trjhtr

Suppose this Java code is converted to Beanshell and called by an application which reads a spreadsheet and validates the department of each employee at a university.

My primary concern is if there is a more efficient, standard, or otherwise better way to go about validating an employee's department rather than how I have done so below. Null should be returned if the department is invalid.

import java.util.HashSet;
import java.util.Arrays;

public class Test

 public static final String VALID_DEPARTMENTS = 
 "Computer Science", "Biology"
 ;

 public static final HashSet<String> set = new HashSet<String>( Arrays.asList(VALID_DEPARTMENTS) );

 public String validate(String dep) 
 if( set.contains(dep) )
 return dep; 
 return null;
 

 public static void main(String args)
 Test t = new Test();
 System.out.println( t.validate("CS") );
 

A few things come to mind:

1. In Java 9 one can use Set.of("X", "Y", ...).


2. Or could simplify to private static final Set<String> VALID_DEPARTMENTS = new HashSet<>(Arrays.asList("A", "B"));
   


3. Could modify validate(dep) to return set.contains(dep) ? dep : null;
   


4. It would be nice to return "" instead of null if at all possible. This is so that a project won't end up with tons of if (x != null) all over the place.


5. Recommend renaming Test to something more descriptive. Maybe DepartmentValidator might be a step in the right direction.


6. Probably refactor dep to department. Eventually the meaning may become less obvious as time passes and the code base grows larger.


7. Note: the validation is currently quite strict (exact match), so I'm assuming the incoming data is pretty exact (no misspellings or different capitalization, etc.)