How To Set Positional Arguments in Jenkins Groovy - jenkins

Question

Does Groovy support positional arguments?
I have a function defined in a Jenkins shared library name.groovy
def call(name, age) {
sh """
echo "My name is: ${name}"
echo "My age is: ${age}"
"""
}
And when I call it from the pipeline
stage ('Shared Library') {
steps {
name("Foo", "21")
}
}
It works perfectly and I get
My name is Foo
My age is 21
However, I would like to set the arguments positionally so that it prints correctly regardless of how they're placed.
But when I do
stage ('Shared Library') {
steps {
name(age: "21", name: "Foo")
}
}
I get
My name is null
My age is null
Is there a way to set this correctly?

Answer 1

What you are asking here is how to use a Map type as the input argument for your custom step method global variable. age: "21", name: "Foo" would be a Map in this situation. You can refactor the global variable method for your custom step like this:
def call(Map args) {
sh """
echo "My name is: ${args.name}"
echo "My age is: ${args.age}"
"""
}
and then you could invoke in your pipeline steps:
stage ('Shared Library') {
steps {
name(age: '21', name: 'Foo')
}
}
with the expected results.
We could also improve the method with some intrinsic Groovy methods and argument checks with the null coalescing operator:
def call(Map args) {
// provide defaults for arguments
args.name = args.name ?: 'no name'
args.age = args.age ?: 'unknown age'
// output name and age to stdout
print "My name is: ${args.name}"
print "My age is: ${args.age}"
}