On 03/21/2016 09:52 AM, Josef Reidinger wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Mar 2016 09:57:11 +0100
> Ancor Gonzalez Sosa <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> I have a design decision to take and I need advise. Please, stay on
>> topic (i.e. "design a ruby layer to query the not-under-discussion
>> structure of devicegraphs coming from libstorage").
>>
>> While writing the code for the new proposal we needed to query a
>> devicegraph (hopefully you all know what a devicegraph is in the
>> libstorage-ng world) for things like:
>>
>> - all free spaces in a given subset of disks (candidates for install)
>> - all filesystems in the same subset, not caring if they are directly
>> on the disk or on a partition table
>>
>> While writing tests, we found we had similar requirements but without
>> constraining those queries to a set of disks (i.e. we wanted to list
>> the free spaces, partitions, filesystems, etc. at some point of the
>> whole devicegraph).
>>
>> We came up with the idea of a Devicegraph query object that is already
>> partially implemented and seems to solve our problems. But if we are
>> going to start using it in many places (there will be calls in almost
>> every single test) I want to make sure the API does not suck much. I
>> have two alternatives and would like to hear/read opinions.
>>
>> As usual, we don't want to over-engineer it, but we don't want to
>> throw it away with the next requirement change either.
>>
>> Explanation by example, hopefully enough (ping me if it's not). Please
>> read both options before commenting (I actually like more the second
>> one).
>>
>> Option 1 - Only a DevicegraphQuery class
>>
>> https://gist.github.com/ancorgs/9c628ef0f4fa717a2817
>>
>> But, what about something like this?
>> more_fine_query.disks
>>
>> With the implementation I have in mind, it would return the same that
>> fine_query.disks, but some people could expect it to return only disks
>> from fine_query.disks which, as additional requirement, contain any
>> primary partition.
>>
>> This, of course, can be solved documenting which restrictions are
>> honored by each query method (for example, #disks would only honor
>> #with_disk while #partitions would honor both #with_disk and
>> #with_partition).
>>
>> That is, the expected direction of the hierarchy (like "a filesystem
>> can be expected at some point below a disk, but not the other way
>> around") would be in the source code and documentation of the methods
>> at DevicegraphQuery.
>>
>> Option 2 - A WhateverQuery class per type of object
>>
>> https://gist.github.com/ancorgs/a98597fa9a5e348eaaac
>>
>> This is my preferred option for several reasons, even if it means
>> implementing more classes (something that is not bad, per se).
>>
>> First of all, the direction of the hierarchy is reflected in the API
>> (DiskQuery has a method #filesystems which returns a FilesystemQuery
>> but not the other way around).
>>
>> It also makes possible (and easy) to write specific filters for a
>> given type of query, like
>> # Get an array of free spaces big enough to be used for something
>> FreeDiskSpaceQuery.new(devicegraph).useful.to_a
>>
>> I also find it more readable for the tests and very Ruby-like (even
>> Rails-like), but that can be a matter of taste.
>>
>> Opinions?
>
> Hi,
> I check both examples and few notes:
>
> 1) we should reinvent wheel. ActiveModel already have queries, so why
> not use it?
Actually not. ActiveRecord provides queries. ActiveModel provides a lot
of useful stuff as the base for ActiveRecord, but not the queries
themselves.
Moreover, the second alternative presented in my mail is heavily
inspired by ActiveRecord query interface.
Using ActiveModel itself (instead of just taking it as inspiration) is
an interesting idea, but Disk, Partition and so on are classes already
provided by the underlying libstorage, so I don't want to mess to much
with them including ActiveModel modules and so on.
> 2) Why we need to create query object? It is not intuitive for me. I
> expect query is action on container, not object itself.
> It is same for me like having
> `Question.new(human).age?`
> versus
> `human.age?`
> Also in ActiveModel mentioned above you do not use something like
> `Query.new(Human.all).with_age(25)` but `Human.all.with_age(25)`
Actually, in ActiveRecord you also have a separate
ActiveRecord::Relation class, very similar in purpose to the query
classes of the second alternative.
Your example in ActiveRecord can broken into pieces like this,
a_relation_object = Human.all # ActiveRecord::Relation
a_relation_object.with_age(25)
So the separate query class is there and you are interacting with it
when doing "with_age(25)". Pretty much the same that is proposed in my
mail. The only difference if that ActiveRecord provides a module which
adds class methods like .all to your models in order to "hide" the
creation of those ActiveRecord::Relation objects.
We can easily do a similar thing implementing the second alternative and
then adding a refinement like
refine ::Storage::Devicegraph.singleton_class do
def disks
DevicegraphQuery.new(self).disks
end
def filesystems
DevicegraphQuery.new(self).filesystems
end
...
end
> 3) it is probably related to 2), second approach looks better to me,
> just please no query object. Object should be containers like Disks or
> Partitions holding object of given type which you can query, filter,
> whatever. See for example this code using this approach in yast(!) -
> https://github.com/yast/yast-cio/blob/master/src/lib/iochannel/channels.rb#L37
Indeed, DiskQuery, FilesystemQuery and so on in my second proposal are
containers. Pretty much the same you expect, apart from the name.
> So to sum it, for me the main design issue is that query is not object,
> but action. Object is for me container holding objects of given type
> with actions on it.
> Then you can have your code like:
> https://gist.github.com/jreidinger/3883aa68662e9a7fdc7b
As said, what you suggest is exactly option 2 with the refinement I
wrote two paragraph ago. You simply call my XxxQuery classes as "array
on steroid". :-) So simply renaming DiskQuery to DiskList or
DiskArrayOnSteroids will 100% fit your expectations.
So I will count you as a vote for option 2. ;-)
Cheers.
--
Ancor González Sosa
YaST Team at SUSE Linux GmbH
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