· f records

F#: Overlapping fields in record types

A problem which has confused me for a while is how to create instances of record types whose fields overlap with another record defined further down in an F# file.

The most recently defined record seems to take precedence even if it has more fields than a record defined earlier and you don’t specify all of those fields in your record creation attempt.

For example, if I have the following two record types:

type Mark = { Value : string }
type SpecificMark = { Value: string; AnotherValue : int }

I thought it would be possible to create an instance of 'Mark' by doing this:

let mark = { Value = "mark" }

But what I actually got is the following compilation error:

No assignment given for field 'AnotherValue'

It turns out that you need to be more explicit about the fact that you want to create the 'Mark' record type.

Using the pre F# 1.9.16 syntax we would use the following object expression:

let mark = { new Mark with Value = "mark" }

But versions after that indicate that this syntax is deprecated and we need to do something more like this:

let mark = { new Mark with member self.Value = "mark" }

Which leads to the following error:

error FS0191: Only simple bindings of the form 'id = expr' can be used in construction expressions

This has also been mentioned on the hubfs forums although there is no suggestion as for why this syntax would be invalid - it seems like it should work to me.

Luckily there are a couple of other ways to get an instance of the 'Mark' type:

let (m:Mark) = { Value = "mark" }
let mark = {Value = "mark" } : Mark

Both of which require less typing anyway!

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