I’m having a small issue that is confounding me. I’m trying to gather my validation messages inside...

# getting-started

[Victor Cardona]

I’m having a small issue that is confounding me. I’m trying to gather my validation messages inside a class’ companion object like so:

internal companion object {
        internal val validation = object {
            val name_blank: String = "Presenter must have a name"
        }
    }

The problem I’m having is that the name_blank property is not visible anywhere.
Presenter.validation.name_blank // Error, name_blank not resolved

[Milan Hruban]

Hi, if you expose anonymous object (as a return type or public property), it get's exposed as it's supertype (in this case it's Any, because you haven't declared any supertype). So the properties are not visible outside of the file.
https://kotlinlang.org/docs/object-declarations.html#object-declarations

[Victor Cardona]

Thank you! I had noticed that it was exposed as Any, but that didn’t register with me for some reason. After rethinking my approach here is what I ended up with. This works and allows for additional validations in the future.

internal object Validator {
    const val NAME_BLANK: String = "Presenter must have a name"

    internal fun validateName(name: String): String {
        notBlank(name, NAME_BLANK)
        return name;
    }
}