How do you use a type outside of its own namespace in clojure?

Question

I have a project set up with leiningen called techne. I created a module called scrub with a type in it called Scrub and a function called foo.

techne/scrub.clj:

(ns techne.scrub)
  (deftype Scrub [state]
    Object
     (toString [this]
     (str "SCRUB: " state)))

(defn foo
  [item]
  (Scrub. "foo")
  "bar")

techne/scrub_test.clj:

(ns techne.scrub-test                                                                                                                                             
  (:use [techne.scrub] :reload-all)                                                                                                                               
  (:use [clojure.test]))                                                                                                                                          


(deftest test-foo                                                                                                                                                 
  (is (= "bar" (foo "foo"))))                                                                                                                                                           

(deftest test-scrub                                                                                                                                               
  (is (= (Scrub. :a) (Scrub. :a)))) 

When I run the test, I get the error:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Unable to resolve    classname: Scrub (scrub_test.clj:11)
    at clojure.lang.Compiler.analyzeSeq(Compiler.java:5376)
    at clojure.lang.Compiler.analyze(Compiler.java:5190)
    at clojure.lang.Compiler.analyzeSeq(Compiler.java:5357)

If I remove test-scrub everything works fine. Why does :use techne.scrub 'import' the function definitions but not the type definitions? How do I reference the type definitions?

Answer 1

Because deftype generates a class, you will probably need to import that Java class in techne.scrub-test with (:import [techne.scrub Scrub]) in your ns definition.

I actually wrote up this same thing with respect to defrecord here:

• http://tech.puredanger.com/2010/06/30/using-records-from-a-different-namespace-in-clojure/

Another thing you could do would be to define a constructor function in scrub:

(defn new-scrub [state] 
  (Scrub. state))

and then you would not need to import Scrub in test-scrub.