Difficulty in using ListProperty as an optional value

Help/Discuss
1

the implementation of ListProperty appears to make it very difficult to use as an optional value, i.e. getOrElse will never produce the value specified as orElse

The reason being that a AbstractCollectionProperty initialises the property with defaultValue = emptySupplier() and convention = noValueSupplier()

emptySupplier yields an empty list so has presence in property terms which means that getOrElse will always resolve to get (as there is a value present for it to get)

The only workaround for this that I can find is to add a call like this

    Iterable<String> empty = null
    myListStringProperty.set(empty)

In groovy, this further requires use of @CompileStatic to enable it to disambiguate between set(Iterable<String>) and set(Provider)

This seems v clumsy behaviour at best (and it’s also not documented as far as I can see). Is there a better way to do this or is the implementation somewhat flawed?

2

I also would really like to know if this is the intended behavior or a bug. If it is a bug then I intend to create a github issue if it does not already exist.