One of the great advantages of Scala’s case classes is that compared to regular classes, bunch of useful methods, such as equals , hashCode and toString , are automatically generated. The generated toString method is nice, because it includes actual field values of the displayed case class.

case class Test (name: String, value: Int) (name: String, value: Int) val test = Test ( "The Answer" , 42 ) test = toString // Test(The Answer,42) test.

The above output is good, but for case classes with many fields, nested structures or just lots of similar fields, it can become not so clear which value belongs to which field, as shown below:

case class Config (poolSize: Int, maxConnections: Int, batchSize: Int, intervalLength: Int, maxTimeout: Int) (poolSize: Int, maxConnections: Int, batchSize: Int, intervalLength: Int, maxTimeout: Int) val config = Config ( 45 , 23 , 10 , 10 , 5000 ) config = toString // Config(45,23,10,10,5000) config.

Wouldn’t it help if we could also see field names for these values? In this article, I’ll show how this can be done without much boilerplate using Cats and Kittens libraries.

1 Before we begin

All code examples below assume that you have Cats and Kittens libraries imported into your project. You can do that by adding following lines to build.sbt :

Seq ( libraryDependencies ++= "org.typelevel" %% "cats-core" % "2.0.0" , %% "org.typelevel" %% "kittens" % "2.0.0" %% )

This article also assumes that you’re familiar with concept of typeclasses and you have and least basic knowledge of the Cats library.

2 Using Show typeclass

Before deciding how to eventually implement the toString method to match our requirements, we should discuss if toString is really the way we want to use. Implementing it for our case classes is fine, but what if we want to define it for case class from 3rd party libraries? Extending such case class, even if possible, is obviously not the most nice way.

So instead of overriding the toString method, we will use the Show typeclass from Cats library. It allows us to implement instance of Show typeclass for any case class, either ours or from 3rd party library. Let’s see how we can implement very dummy version for previously shown Config case class, that will also print field names.

import cats._ cats._ import cats.implicits._ cats.implicits._ case class Config (poolSize: Int, maxConnections: Int, batchSize: Int, intervalLength: Int, maxTimeout: Int) (poolSize: Int, maxConnections: Int, batchSize: Int, intervalLength: Int, maxTimeout: Int) object Config { Config { implicit val showConfig: Show[ Config ] = Show { instance => showConfig: Show[] = Show { instance => s "Config(poolSize=${instance.poolSize}, maxConnections=${instance.maxConnections}, " + s "batchSize=${instance.batchSize}, intervalLength=${instance.intervalLength}, maxTimeout=${instance.maxTimeout})" } } val config = Config (...) config =(...) show // Config(poolSize=45, maxConnections=23, batchSize=10, intervalLength=10, maxTimeout=5000) config.

This results in much better looking output, but the implementation is really cumbersome and definitely something we don’t want to do in real-world codebase. But there’s way how to generate all this stuff automatically.

3 Automatic derivation of Show typeclass

Here comes the Kittens library to the rescue. It offers automatic derivation of typeclasses from Cats using Shapeless, meaning it can also automatically derive instance of Show typeclass for our case classes. One of the advantages of automatically derived Show instance is that it also renders case class field names:

import cats._ cats._ import cats.implicits._ cats.implicits._ case class Config (poolSize: Int, maxConnections: Int, batchSize: Int, intervalLength: Int, maxTimeout: Int) (poolSize: Int, maxConnections: Int, batchSize: Int, intervalLength: Int, maxTimeout: Int) object Config { implicit val showConfig: Show[ Config ] = derived. semi . show } Config {showConfig: Show[] = derived. val config = Config (...) config =(...) show // Config(poolSize = 45, maxConnections = 23, batchSize = 10, intervalLength = 10, maxTimeout = 5000) config.

This is exactly what we wanted to achieve, and this time without all that hand-written boilerplate code. In Kittens, this method of automatic derivation is called semi-auto, as we still need to define the implicit value of Show instance on our own. There is also option to use full-auto derivation:

import cats._ cats._ import cats.implicits._ cats.implicits._ case class Config (poolSize: Int, maxConnections: Int, batchSize: Int, intervalLength: Int, maxTimeout: Int) (poolSize: Int, maxConnections: Int, batchSize: Int, intervalLength: Int, maxTimeout: Int) import derived.auto.show._ // enables fully automatic derivation derived.auto.show._ // enables fully automatic derivation val config = Config (...) config =(...) show // Config(poolSize = 45, maxConnections = 23, batchSize = 10, intervalLength = 10, maxTimeout = 5000) config.

When using the full-auto mode, we don’t even need to define the Show instance as implicit value, so there’s less boilerplate. However, we lose some control over where and what is automatically derived. For that reason, I’d personally recommend using the semi-auto derivation instead. You can also check Kittens documentation for all available derivation modes.

4 Changes in Scala 2.13

The above solution is based on the fact that in Scala 2.12 and older, you can easily get field values of case class using the productIterator method (since each case class inherits from the Product trait), but there’s no nice way how to get field names. However, in Scala 2.13, there’s new method productElementNames, that returns collection of field names. Using this new method, we can write really simple implementation of toString alternative, that will return same result as the above solution using Kittens:

def show (product: Product): String = { (product: Product): String = { val className = product. productPrefix className = product. val fieldNames = product. productElementNames . toList fieldNames = product. val fieldValues = product. productIterator . toList fieldValues = product. val fields = fieldNames. zip (fieldValues). map { case (name, value) => s "$name = $value" } fields = fieldNames.(fieldValues).(name, value) => s mkString (s "$className(" , ", " , ")" ) fields.(s } case class Test (label: String, value: Int) (label: String, value: Int) val test = Test ( "The Answer" , 42 ) test = show (test) // Test(label = The Answer, value = 42) (test)

This solution might be preferred if you dont need compatibility with older Scala versions, as it doesn’t need any external libraries to be used.