I'm new on ruby, I come from C/C++.
I'm currently working on data integration between a partner and me.
I get the API response with httparty and then parse it with JSON.parse.
The hash result is like multi level nested ( around 5-6 levels )
Initially, since I'm new on ruby, I wanted to develop naturally, without thinking of number of methods, number of line in methods, the only goal was to clearly separate each extraction from another in distinct methods.
The extraction from this nested hash is conditional extract, what I mean is there is multiples object of the same structure inside the hash.
And my extraction is like something like this:
if get_flight(json_response) == blabla_id
stored_blabla_id = blabla_id
end
then later
get_departure_place_from_flight(json_response, stored_blabla_id)
I read many articles about obectifying hash like this good one, or building some engines-extractor that getting value based on key passed in arguments.
Since I'm getting a really huge json response, and since I'm not extracting all the values but specifics one, I'm wondering if its not bad for usage/performance.
My point : the class is working properly BUT: I have 25 methods in one class, and the content of theses methods are like a direct access from the nested hash. I find it very ugly.
I was wondering since I have 2 request methods to the API, 1 method dedicated to construct URL, and the others one dedicated to extraction from the JSON response , is it appropriate to split the class into modules?
Or, is this kind of ugly class common in JSON parse/extracting value from whatever API's?
Related
I have json array & want to group weeks according to person id's as mentioned in below example. I tried code but unable to get it because i am new to free-marker code. The JSON Array as follows:-
[{"Hours":"5.500","Status":"Draft","Week":"17","person_name":"Raj","person_id":"1414"},
{"Hours":"0.500","Status":"Draft","Week":"17","person_name":"Raj","person_id":"1414"},
{"Hours":"24.500","Status":"Draft","Week":"14","person_name":"Mukesh","person_id":"1046"},
{"Hours":"7.500","Status":"Draft","Week":"15","person_name":"Mukesh","person_id":"1046"},
{"Hours":"3.000","Status":"Draft","Week":"16","person_name":"Mukesh","person_id":"1046"}]
Could please help me. The output in below foramt
for id {1046:[14,15,16], 1414:[17,17]}
Such kind of restructuring is not something that should be done inside a template. While FTL can add together map-like values and also list-like values, it would be very inefficient to hack this together with that (it's only for very simple tasks). The entries should be already grouped before passing the data to the template.
If you must initiate this from the template, then you will need a utility Java object that has a method that does this grouping, or a TemplateMethodModelEx implementation that does it. Then you call that utility object from the template (like utils.groupByPersonId(foo) or groupByPersonId(foo)). Such utility objects can be exposed to the template on various ways: as part of the data-model, globally as "shared variable" through the freemarker.tempalte.Configuration object, or by ensuring that the utility TemplateMethodModelEx (or any other TemplateModel) class is visible for Java and then do something like <#assign groupByPersonId = 'com.example.GroupByPersonIdMethod'?new()> in the template.
Lets say we have a class "Car" than has different pieces of data ( maker, model, color, fabrication date, registration date, etc). The class has no method to get data, but it knows to as for it from another object (sent via constructor, let's cal it for short DS).- and the same for when needing to update changes.
A method getColor() would be implemented like this
if(! this->loaded('color')){
this->askDS('color') // this will do the necesarry work to generate a request to DS
}
return this->information('color');
Nothing too fancy so far. No comes the part i want to find out if it has a name, or if there are libraries / frameworks that do this already.
DS has a list of methods registered dinamically based on the class that needs data. For car we have:
input: car serial number, output: method to use to read the numbers to extract raw values
input: car raw color value, output: color code
input: car color code, manufacturer, year, mode, output:human-readable color (for example navy blue)
Now, DS or any method does not have an ordered list of using command to start from serial number and return the color blue, but if can construct a chain of methods that from one set of data, it can run them in order and get the desired data.
For our example above, DS runs 1,2,3 in that order and injects the data resulted from all methods into the class object that needed it.
Now if the car needs registration info, we have method (4) that gets that from the police database with an api request.
So, given:
- a type of model (class/object)
- a list of methods that take a fixed list of input(object properties) and give out a fixed list of output (object properties)
- a class DS that can glue the methods and run the needed ones for a model to get from property A (serial) to properby B (human readable colour) without the model or DS having a preconfigured way to get this data but finding it as needed.
does this have a name or is it already implemented somewhere ?
I've implemented a very basic prototype and it works very nice and i think this implementation method has useful features:
if you have a set of methods that do sql queries and then your app switches to using an api, you only need to change the methods and don't have to touch any other part of the application
when looking for a chain of methods that resolve the 'need' the object has, you can find a method chain, run it, if it fails keep looking for another list of methods based on the currently available data - so if you have multiple sources for a piece of data, it can try multiple versions
starting from the above paragraph i could start with an app that only has sql queries for data retrieval - when i find out a part of the app overloads the sql server i could add a method to retrieve data from cache with a lower cost than the one from database (or multiple layered caches, each with different costs)
i could probably add business logi in the mix the same ways as cache, and based on the user location / options present different data
this requires less coding overall, and decouples the data source from the object, making each piece easier to mock/test
what is needed to make this fast is a caching solution for the discovered method chains, since matching hundreds of thousands of methods per model type would be time-consuming but I don't think this is very hard to do - just store all found chains in memory as you find them and some metadata to be able to resume a search from any point in time - when you update the methods, just clear the cache, take a performance hit for the first requests
Thank you for your time
What you describe sounds like a somewhat roundabout way of doing Dependency Injection. Quote:
"Passing the service to the client, rather than allowing a client to
build or find the service, is the fundamental requirement of the
pattern."
Depending on what language you're using, there should be several Dependency Injection frameworks/libraries available.
If I want to handle many parameters from for example a web request and pass it between classes (layers) - what is the preferred way?
I know it is easy to pass optional numbers of parameters through the constructor as a map.
I can also pass a map directly and if the keys match the receiving objects property names it should work in a similar way
Or I could just pass the map and then instantiate for example domain classes from that
I could use a special class as data carrier with given number of properties
I have a domain class (not database domain but business domain) that needs data from the user interface.
What is the best way to pass data through the layers and how do I know that all required data is being passed if using a data structure - like a map - with key values? If I would have a more static constructor with a given number of parameters, then I would know that the parameters are being passed. But how do I secure this when using a more dynamic approach? With unit tests?
Well in Grails command objects are an excellent choice. You can pass them up to various layers without issues. They are pretty analogous to domain classes, only without the whole persistence functionality.
Otherwise I would recommend using plain old Groovy classes (POGOs). Groovy allows you to keep your code very short (compared to Java and many other languages as well) and offers very handy transforms for common design patterns you might need (e.g. Canonical, Immutable, IndexedProperty, DelegatesTo...).
Compared to command objects POGOs do require you to write e.g. validation code by yourself, but this can be as simple as
boolean isValid() {
name && lastName && countryCode in ['US', 'CA']
}
You can keep static factories in a POGO to help you construct them in the various circumstances. Plus you can define more than one class in a file so you can keep the POGO code wherever it makes most sense. I would definitely prefer this approach to simple maps because the code is better encapsulated, POGOs can be unit tested & documented.
Thanks to some other posts and reading, I understand singleton/meta classes. And I understand why we'd want to use them on a class. But I still don't understand why we'd want to use them on instance objects. And I've yet to see it in practice.
I'm referring to something like this:
class Vehicle
def odometer_reading
# some code
end
end
my_car = Vehicle.new
def my_car.open_door
# some code
end
At first thought, this seems like a bad idea as it would lead to difficulties in understanding the code and debugging.
Why would we want to do this? What are some examples of when this is a good idea?
One example is using it for testing purposes: creating mock and double objects, stubbing methods. Debugging is somewhere nearby: re-defining the logging method for a specific object that you suspect is mis-behaving, so that the log info is printed directly to console (or more info is printed) during the debug session.
Another example is dealing with special cases - instead of inheritance you can do just that. Starting from a classical example if you use two types of Employees, say, Engineers and SalesPersons, for which the rules of compensation calculation are different, you can put the common logic into the Employee class, then inherit the other two classes from it and implement their own calculate_salary methods there. Now, if there is an outlier - a star salesman that you have agreed to a different compensation scheme with, a CEO with a very special scheme, etc - instead of creating a whole sub-class for this special employee, you can just define this method for a specific object representing that employee.
The third example is dealing with an object lifecycle and performance considerations. Instead of having a long case of various states in some processing method. E.g. for a file-reading class that transparently caches the entire file in the background (I know a too-simplistic-for-real-life approach, but just as a model) all read requests while the file is not entirely read should check if the requested data is already in the cache or should be read from disk. Once the file is fully read they always go from the cache. Instead of having the if (case if there are more states) to deal with this you could simply re-define the read method at the object-level once the file is fully read to the cache. For this simple example it doesn't lead to any sizable performance benefit (if any benefit at all), but for more complex cases that may be worth it.
You wouldn't add them using def, that's a rather rigid way of doing it, but instead by using something like define_method or extend.
Although this is not the sort of thing you'd do on a routine basis, it does mean you can do some rather unusual things. ActiveRecord in Rails produces results in the form of an Array with additional methods added on to perform other operations.
An Object-Relationship Mapper would be a case where you'd probably want to do this. Sometimes, depending on how you fetch a record, the methods available differ significantly. Being able to add those dynamically means each fetched object can be completely customized even if they have the same class and general-purpose methods.
Another example: You have an array of hashes and you want each hash to have a method-call getter and setter. Something like:
user = HashOnSteroids.new(name: 'John')
user[:name] # => 'John'
user[:name] = 'Joe'
user.name # => 'Joe'
user.name = 'John'
user.set(name: 'Jim', age: 5)
This means you cannot write standard method definitions in the class as each hash will have a different set of keys (method names). This means you have to resort to defining singleton methods so each object has its own set of methods (not a pack of shared methods).
Warning: Using singleton methods for this use case is highly inefficient. A sneaky method_missing is faster and uses way less memory as it doesn't have to allocate a billion of proc objects.
I am building a RESTful api using a Ruby server and a MongoDB database. The database stores objects as they are, preserving their natural data types (at least those that it supports).
At the moment I am using HTTP GET to pass params to the API, and understandably everything in my database gets stored as strings (because thats what the ruby code sees when it accesses the params[] hash). After deployment, the API will use exclusively HTTP POST, so my question is whether its possible to specify the data types that get sent via POST individually for each parameter (say I have a "uid" which is an integer and a "name" which is a string), or do I need to cast them within Ruby before passing them onto my database?
If I need to cast them, are there any issues related to it?
No, its not possible.
Post variables are just string key value pairs.
You could however implement your own higher level logic.
For example a common practice is to put a suffix to the names. For example everything that ends with _i gets parsed as integer and so on.
However what benefit would it bring to preserve the types? Or better asked. How do you output them? Is it only for storage?
Then it should not be a problem to convert the strings to proper types if that benefits your application and cast them back to strings before delivering.