DynamoDB for our Kotlin Lambda function

This article is part of the Twitter bot with Kotlin in AWS series showing how I created a Twitter bot for Vue 3 updates. But this article works as an independent article on how to create a DynamoDB table and interact with it from Kotlin code.

If you haven't set up a Lambda function in Kotlin before, you can look here. Also remember to give your role running the code permission to access DynamoDB.

Now it's time to set up our DynamoDB table, add some items, and write code to read and update them.

Table setup

First, let's create our table through the AWS CLI. We are specifying our required partition key with the --attribute-definitions and --key-schema, saying that the attribute "Project" is a string and HASH for the partition key.

aws dynamodb create-table --table-name twitter-bot-vue-3 --attribute-definitions AttributeName=Project,AttributeType=S -
-key-schema AttributeName=Project,KeyType=HASH --billing-mode PAY_PER_REQUEST

For my use case, I want an item for each changelog file I'm looking up. They will be defined beforehand, so you can add them through the AWS console, AWS CLI or code if you want. This is how to add an item with the CLI. (for Linux based systems, you can change to single quotes ' on the start and end and skip the escaping of quotes).

aws dynamodb put-item --table-name twitter-bot-vue-3 --item "{\"Project\": {\"S\": \"Vue 3\"}, \"Changelog\": {\"S\": \"
https://github.com/vuejs/vue-next/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md\"}, \"LastRecordedChange\": {\"S\": \"\"}}"

Dependencies

Now go to the build.gradle.kts file and add these two dependencies (add them to the existing dependencies in your file). You can find the latest version here.

dependencies {
    implementation(platform("software.amazon.awssdk:bom:2.13.18"))
    implementation("software.amazon.awssdk:dynamodb")
}

Read and update items

I have the file ProjectsDB.kt which has two methods that interact with the DynamoDB table.

import software.amazon.awssdk.services.dynamodb.DynamoDbClient
import software.amazon.awssdk.services.dynamodb.model.*

data class Project(val name: String, val changelog: String, var lastRecordedChangelog: String)

const val tableName = "twitter-bot-vue-3"

fun readProjects(): List<Project>{
    val client = DynamoDbClient.create()

    val result = client.scan {
        it.tableName(tableName)
    }
    return result.items().map {
        Project(it["Project"]!!.s(), it["Changelog"]!!.s(), it["LastRecordedChange"]!!.s())
    }
}

fun updateProjectLastRecordedChange(project: Project){
    val client = DynamoDbClient.create()

    val key = mutableMapOf(Pair("Project", createAttributeValueString(project.name)))
    val updates = mutableMapOf(Pair("LastRecordedChange", AttributeValueUpdate
        .builder()
        .value(createAttributeValueString(project.lastRecordedChangelog))
        .action(AttributeAction.PUT)
        .build()
    ))

    client.updateItem {
        it.tableName(tableName)
        it.key(key)
        it.attributeUpdates(updates)
    }
}

fun createAttributeValueString(value: String): AttributeValue = AttributeValue.builder().s(value).build()

Updating the Lambda function

First, we need a function that checks the latest update to the changelog files in the Vue repositories.

import java.net.URL

fun checkChangelog(url: String): String{
    val rawGithubUrl = url.replace("https://github.com/", "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/").replace("blob/", "")
    val text = URL(rawGithubUrl).readText()
    return text.lines().first()
}

Now let's update the Lambda function with some logic.

fun runLambda(){
    val projects = readProjects()
    for(project in projects){
        val latestChange = checkChangelog(project.changelog)
        if(latestChange != project.lastRecordedChangelog){
            project.lastRecordedChangelog = latestChange
            // tweet(project)
            updateProjectLastRecordedChange(project)
        }
    }
}

That's it. If you want a temporary tweet function that prints the tweet message you can use this.

fun tweet(project: Project){
    val regex = """\[.+]""".toRegex()
    val version = regex.find(project.lastRecordedChangelog)?.value?.trim('[', ']')
    val message = "${project.name}, ${if(version.isNullOrEmpty()) "new version" else version} is out! (${project.changelog}) #VueJS"
    println(message)
}

Comments

[John Darryl Pelingo]

Why do we need two packages from AWS?

implementation(platform("software.amazon.awssdk:bom:2.13.18"))
implementation("software.amazon.awssdk:dynamodb")

What's the bom for? I find the documentation of AWS a bit confusing when browsing all Java packages.

[Gaute Meek Olsen]

Hi, I agree that the documentation is confusing. That's a part I wish the AWS would improve.

So the bom package is for managing the versions of other AWS packages for us. As you see I don't need to specify the version for the dynamodb package. But I guess it's actually not beneficial until several AWS packages are used in the project.

You should be able to do something like this instead if you like (haven't tested it):

implementation("software.amazon.awssdk:dynamodb:2.15.33")

[John Darryl Pelingo]

Hello again!
Thanks for the reply! I think I figured it out after trying out stuff on my own. It's as you said and before that (1.x), people would have to install the dependencies one by one with their version. But now it's all "unified" under one version. So updating the AWS dependencies is not a huge pain, I guess.

It was a bit hard to navigate around the dependency management system of Java at the beginning as someone coming from yarn/npm install.

[starpebble]

Let's get this going with the DynamoDB Document Client!