I continue my exploration of Rust through a simple implementation of the Active Record design pattern.
Last week I told the story of how I had created a simple Property<T> type, and a collection thereof. But of course a real object has many properties, and of various different types at once; so such a PropertyMap<T> was not exactly what I needed, unless all of your properties are the same type.
To solve that issue, in my original C++ implementation from 2008 I used the Poco::Any type, itself based on the original Boost library of the same name, created by Kevlin Henney.
I quickly found out that Rust had an Any trait, but after some fiddling I could not make it work the way I wanted.
That had to do more with my lack of knowledge of Rust than anything else; see, Rust’s Any is a trait, not a struct, so the semantics in my head were, of course, twisted, and I could not find a solution.
Thankfully DuckDuckGo was kind enough to provide me with the answer, in the form of a blog post by Simone Vittori published last year. The idea is simple, and will sound familiar to those using Swift, by the way: use an enum.
#[derive(Clone, Debug)]
pub enum AnyProperty {
Str(Property<&'static str>),
Int(Property<i32>),
Float(Property<f64>),
Bool(Property<bool>),
DateTime(Property<DateTime<Utc>>),
}
Now I can hold many of these in the same bag:
#[derive(Clone, Debug)]
pub struct AnyPropertyMap {
properties: HashMap<String, AnyProperty>,
}
The whole API is very simple to use now:
#[test]
fn create_any_property_map() {
let a = AnyProperty::from_int("int", 22);
let b = AnyProperty::from_str("str", "value");
let c = AnyProperty::from_float("float", 1.234);
let d = AnyProperty::from_bool("bool", true);
let e = AnyProperty::from_datetime("date", Utc::now());
let m = AnyPropertyMap::from(vec![a, b, c, d, e]);
assert_eq!(m.len(), 5);
}
And thanks to pattern matching, translating such properties to strings becomes very simple and straighforward. This will look familiar to Swift developers; the influence of Rust in Swift is here more visible than anywhere else, in my opinion.
pub fn get_value(&self) -> String {
return match self {
AnyProperty::Str(prop) => format!("'{}'", prop.value),
AnyProperty::Int(prop) => format!("{}", prop.value),
AnyProperty::Float(prop) => format!("{}", prop.value),
AnyProperty::Bool(prop) => {
let val = if prop.value { "TRUE" } else { "FALSE" };
format!("{}", val)
}
AnyProperty::DateTime(prop) => format!("'{}'", prop.value.to_rfc3339()),
};
}
To be able to handle date and time information, I chose the chrono crate, which provides a very handy and useful DateTime struct to work with.
I started working on the actual ActiveRecord pattern implementation, and I have published the code as usual in my GitLab account. Feel free to clone and play with it. The code is already bundled with as many unit tests as I could fit, and more will come. The usual cargo test command will execute them for your testing pleasure.
The final objective of this exercise is to achieve an API that will look more or less like this:
let mut o = Object::create();
o.set_name("Milk");
o.set_price(1.23);
o.set_valid(true);
o.save();
o.set_price(2.56);
o.set_valid(false);
o.save();
And at the end, a SQLite file will be generated with those objects stored in a table. I am planning to explore Rust’s macro system and syntax in order to generate most of the boilerplate code required for this library to be useful.
I know that many consider Active Record an antipattern, but I do not pretend this library to become a production thing anytime soon; of course, the Internet being what it is, I added a BSD 3 license to the bundle, just in case.
Upcoming Explorations
Another thing I started exploring this week was how to create web applications with Rust; in particular I built a simple web application using Actix with the Askama template library, and then wrapping the whole thing inside a Docker container image.
But I will leave that for a future post. In short, I loved it; the final code is ultra fast, in the shape of a very small self-contained binary, perfectly suitable for a deployment in Kubernetes. I rewrote a very simple Flask application in a few hours. More soon!