Guide to Guava RangeMap

1. Overview

In this tutorial, we’ll show how to use the Google Guava’s RangeMap interface and its implementations.

A RangeMap is a special kind of mapping from disjoint non-empty ranges to non-null values. Using queries, we may look up the value for any particular range in that map.

The basic implementation of RangeMap is a TreeRangeMap. Internally the map makes use of a TreeMap to store the key as a range and the value as any custom Java object.

2. Google Guava’s RangeMap

Let’s have a look at how to use the RangeMap class.

2.1. Maven Dependency

Let’s start by adding Google’s Guava library dependency in the pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.google.guava</groupId>
    <artifactId>guava</artifactId>
    <version>21.0</version>
</dependency>

The latest version of the dependency can be checked here.

3. Creating

Some of the ways in which we may create an instance of RangeMap are:

• Use the create method from the TreeRangeMap class to create a mutable map:

RangeMap<Integer, String> experienceRangeDesignationMap
  = TreeRangeMap.create();

• If we intend to create an immutable range map, use the ImmutableRangeMap class (which follows a builder pattern):

RangeMap<Integer, String> experienceRangeDesignationMap
  = new ImmutableRangeMap.<Integer, String>builder()
  .put(Range.closed(0, 2), "Associate")
  .build();

4. Using

Let’s start with a simple example showing the usage of RangeMap.

4.1. Retrieval Based on Input Within a Range

We can get a value associated with a value within a range of integers:

@Test
public void givenRangeMap_whenQueryWithinRange_returnsSucessfully() {
    RangeMap<Integer, String> experienceRangeDesignationMap 
     = TreeRangeMap.create();

    experienceRangeDesignationMap.put(
      Range.closed(0, 2), "Associate");
    experienceRangeDesignationMap.put(
      Range.closed(3, 5), "Senior Associate");
    experienceRangeDesignationMap.put(
      Range.closed(6, 8),  "Vice President");
    experienceRangeDesignationMap.put(
      Range.closed(9, 15), "Executive Director");

    assertEquals("Vice President", 
      experienceRangeDesignationMap.get(6));
    assertEquals("Executive Director", 
      experienceRangeDesignationMap.get(15));
}

Note:

• The closed method of the Range class assumes the range of integer values to be between 0 to 2 (both inclusive)
• The Range in the above example consists of integers. We may use a range of any type, as long as it implements the Comparable interface such as String, Character, floating point decimals etc.
• RangeMap returns Null when we try to get the value for a range that is not present in map
• In a case of an ImmutableRangeMap, a range of one key cannot overlap with a range of a key that needs to be inserted. If that happens, we get an IllegalArgumentException
• Both keys and values in the RangeMap cannot be null. If either one of them is null, we get a NullPointerException

4.2. Removing a Value Based on a Range

Let’s see how we can remove values. In this example, we show how to remove a value associated with an entire range. We also show how to remove a value based on a partial key range:

@Test
public void givenRangeMap_whenRemoveRangeIsCalled_removesSucessfully() {
    RangeMap<Integer, String> experienceRangeDesignationMap 
      = TreeRangeMap.create();

    experienceRangeDesignationMap.put(
      Range.closed(0, 2), "Associate");
    experienceRangeDesignationMap.put(
      Range.closed(3, 5), "Senior Associate");
    experienceRangeDesignationMap.put(
      Range.closed(6, 8), "Vice President");
    experienceRangeDesignationMap.put(
      Range.closed(9, 15), "Executive Director");
 
    experienceRangeDesignationMap.remove(Range.closed(9, 15));
    experienceRangeDesignationMap.remove(Range.closed(1, 4));
  
    assertNull(experienceRangeDesignationMap.get(9));
    assertEquals("Associate", 
      experienceRangeDesignationMap.get(0));
    assertEquals("Senior Associate", 
      experienceRangeDesignationMap.get(5));
    assertNull(experienceRangeDesignationMap.get(1));
}

As can be seen, even after partially removing values from a range, we still can get the values if the range is still valid.

4.3. Span of Key Range

In case we would like to know what the overall span of a RangeMap is, we may use the span method:

@Test
public void givenRangeMap_whenSpanIsCalled_returnsSucessfully() {
    RangeMap<Integer, String> experienceRangeDesignationMap = 
      TreeRangeMap.create();

    experienceRangeDesignationMap.put(
      Range.closed(0, 2), "Associate");
    experienceRangeDesignationMap.put(
      Range.closed(3, 5), "Senior Associate");
    experienceRangeDesignationMap.put(
      Range.closed(6, 8), "Vice President");
    experienceRangeDesignationMap.put(
      Range.closed(9, 15), "Executive Director");
    experienceRangeDesignationMap.put(
        
    assertEquals(0, experienceSpan.lowerEndpoint().intValue());
    assertEquals(15, experienceSpan.upperEndpoint().intValue());
}

4.4. Getting a SubRangeMap 

When we want to select a part from a RangeMap, we may use the subRangeMap method:

@Test
public void givenRangeMap_whenSpanIsCalled_returnsSucessfully() {
    RangeMap<Integer, String> experienceRangeDesignationMap 
      = TreeRangeMap.create();

    experienceRangeDesignationMap.put(
      Range.closed(0, 2), "Associate");
    experienceRangeDesignationMap.put(
      Range.closed(3, 5), "Senior Associate");
    experienceRangeDesignationMap.put(
      Range.closed(6, 8), "Vice President");
    experienceRangeDesignationMap.put(
      Range.closed(9, 15), "Executive Director");
    RangeMap<Integer, String> experiencedSubRangeDesignationMap         
      = experienceRangeDesignationMap.subRangeMap(Range.closed(4, 14));
        
    assertNull(experiencedSubRangeDesignationMap.get(3));
    assertEquals("Executive Director", 
      experiencedSubRangeDesignationMap.get(14));
    assertEquals("Vice President", 
      experiencedSubRangeDesignationMap.get(7));
}

4.5. Getting an Entry

Finally, if we are looking for an Entry from a RangeMap, we use the getEntry method:

@Test
public void givenRangeMap_whenGetEntryIsCalled_returnsEntrySucessfully() {
    RangeMap<Integer, String> experienceRangeDesignationMap 
      = TreeRangeMap.create();

    experienceRangeDesignationMap.put(
      Range.closed(0, 2), "Associate");
    experienceRangeDesignationMap.put(
      Range.closed(3, 5), "Senior Associate");
    experienceRangeDesignationMap.put(
      Range.closed(6, 8), "Vice President");
    experienceRangeDesignationMap.put(
      Range.closed(9, 15), "Executive Director");
    Map.Entry<Range<Integer>, String> experienceEntry 
      = experienceRangeDesignationMap.getEntry(10);
       
    assertEquals(Range.closed(9, 15), experienceEntry.getKey());
    assertEquals("Executive Director", experienceEntry.getValue());
}

5. Conclusion

In this tutorial, we illustrated examples of using the RangeMap in the Guava library. It is predominantly used to get a value based on the key specified as a from the map.

The implementation of these examples can be found in the GitHub project – this is a Maven-based project, so it should be easy to import and run as is.