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John Kelly
John Kelly

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A Remote Data Request API in Elm

#elm #api #postgrest #webdev

This post is about the core abstractions found in the elm-postgrest package and how those abstractions may be relevant to similar packages.

In Elm, the design space of remote data request APIs has seen its fair share of work.

We have APIs like lukewestby/elm-http-builder which provide a thin convenience layer over elm-lang/http.

addItem : String -> Cmd Msg
addItem item =
    HttpBuilder.post "http://example.com/api/items"
        |> withQueryParams [ ("hello", "world") ]
        |> withHeader "X-My-Header" "Some Header Value"
        |> withJsonBody (itemEncoder item)
        |> withTimeout (10 * Time.second)
        |> withExpect (Http.expectJson itemsDecoder)
        |> withCredentials
        |> send handleRequestComplete
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We have APIs like krisajenkins/remotedata which model the various states remote data can take.

type RemoteData e a
    = NotAsked
    | Loading
    | Failure e
    | Success a
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And, we have APIs like jamesmacaulay/elm-graphql, jahewson/elm-graphql, dillonkearns/graphqelm, mgold/elm-data, noahzgordon/elm-jsonapi, and others which abstract over elm-lang/http to provide an API which is nice in the domain language of their respective specification. We'll refer to this group of APIs as backend specific request builders.

In addition to community efforts, Evan himself wrote up a vision for data interchange in Elm. And although the API for this specific vision likely sits on the same level of abstraction as elm-lang/http, Json.Decode, and Json.Encode rather than backend specific request builders, it legitimized the exploration around "how do you send information between clients and servers?"

Design Space

What is in the design space of remote data request APIs? More specifically, what is in the design space of backend specific request builders?

For the sake of this post, we'll define the design space as:

A means to describe the capabilities of a data model and subsequently build requests against that data model for client-server applications.

With the following design goals:

  • Domain Language vs HTTP - We want to interact with our backends in their own terms rather than their raw transfer protocol. For example, in the context of GraphQL, this means queries, mutations, selection sets, fragments, etc.
  • Selections vs Decoders - We want to speak in terms of what we wish to select rather than how we wish to decode it.
  • Resources vs JSON - We want to speak in terms of the abstract representation of our data model rather than its specific interchange format and/or storage format.
  • Typed vs Untyped - We want to compose our requests using the values of our application rather than the concatenation of query strings.

Let's take a second look at these design goals but this time in the form of a diagram:

Request Builder Schema Description
CRUD requests
selections
conditions
order
limit and offset
pagination		 resource schema
attributes
relationships
cardinality
Abstraction Barrier
Transfer Protocol Interchange Format
HTTP:
headers
body
methods
url: query and fragment
status codes		 json
edn
xml
transit
protobuf

The dividing horizontal line in the diagram represents an abstraction barrier. The barrier, in this case, separates backend specific request builders (above) from their implementation (below). Users at one layer should not need to concern themselves with the details below. The remainder of this post will examine an Elm API at the abstraction level of backend specific request builder.

elm-postgrest

I'm the author of john-kelly/elm-postgrest; a package that abstracts over elm-lang/http, Json.Decode, and Json.Encode to provide a nice API in the context of PostgREST. Like previously stated, this package falls into the category of backend specific request builders.

This post is about the core abstractions found in the elm-postgrest package and how those abstractions may be relevant to similar packages. All examples will be based on the work from john-kelly/elm-postgrest-spa-example, which is an almost complete port of rtfeldman/elm-spa-example to PostgREST. For those unfamiliar with PostgREST, here's an excerpt from their official documentation:

PostgREST is a standalone web server that turns your PostgreSQL database directly into a RESTful API. The structural constraints and permissions in the database determine the API endpoints and operations ... The PostgREST philosophy establishes a single declarative source of truth: the data itself.

The mental model for how these 3 pieces fit together:

elm-postgrest (client) ⇄ PostgREST (server) ⇄ PostgreSQL (db)

In case you're wondering, no knowledge of PostgREST is necessary to make it through this post, however, intermediate knowledge of Elm and technologies like REST, GraphQL, JSON API, Firebase, Parse, or other remote data server specifications will be helpful.

Alright. Now that we have some context, let's dig into the code.

Our First Request

Our first request will retrieve all articles from our remote data server.

For this example, we'll assume that we have a collection of article resources at example.com/api/articles. Each article has a title, a body, and the count of the number of favorites.

I take a top down approach for the code in this example. Keep this in mind! Later sections will help you better understand earlier sections.

Types

We're going to start out by looking at 4 of the core types in elm-postgrest. I provide the internal implementation of each type, however, don't get bogged down in the definition. I show the implementation in an attempt to ground the new PostgRest types to something you're familiar with.

import PostgRest as PG
    exposing
        ( Request
        , Selection
        , Schema
        , Attribute
        )
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  • Request - A fully constructed request. The only thing left to do is convert this value into an Http.Request and send it off to the Elm runtime. As we'll learn, a Request can be constructed with a Selection and a Schema. 
type Request a
    = Read
        { parameters : Parameters
        , decoder : Decode.Decoder a
        }
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  • Selection - The Selection is one of the primary means to build requests against the data model. Specifically, the Selection represents which fields to select and which related resources to embed. 
type Selection attributes a
    = Selection
        (attributes
         ->
            { attributeNames : List String
            , embeds : List Parameters
            , decoder : Decode.Decoder a
            }
        )
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  • Schema - The Schema is the means to describe the capabilities of a data model. Capabilities means what we can select, what we can filter by, and what we can order by. We're only going to cover selection in this post. 
type Schema id attributes
    = Schema String attributes
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  • Attribute - An individual select-able unit of a Schema. For example, the article resource has a title Attribute String. 
type Attribute a
    = Attribute
        { name : String
        , decoder : Decode.Decoder a
        , encoder : a -> Encode.Value
        , urlEncoder : a -> String
        }
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Request

Here we're constructing a Request which will result in a List String. The mental model for this type should be the same as that of an Http.Request: "If we were to send this Request, we can expect back a List String."

getArticles : Request (List String)
getArticles =
    PG.readAll articleSchema articleSelection
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Let's take a look at the function signature of PG.readAll before moving on to the next section.

readAll : Schema id attributes -> Selection attributes a -> Request (List a)
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As we can see by the signature of readAll, a Request can be constructed with a Selection and a Schema. Let's now take a look at our Selection.

Selection

The Selection type has 2 type parameters: attributes and a. The mental model for reading this type is "If given a Schema of attributes, a value of type a could be selected."

articleSelection :
    Selection
        { attributes
            | title : Attribute String
        }
        String
articleSelection =
    PG.field .title
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Things will look vaguely familiar if you've worked with Json.Decode.field. This is intentional. Overall, you'll find that the Selection API is quite similar to the Decoder API. Let's examine the signature of PG.field:

PG.field : (attributes -> Attribute a) -> Selection attributes a
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A field Selection is composed of a dot accessor for an Attribute. If we remember back to the mental model for a Selection, we'll recall that we're in need of a Schema to fulfill the Selection. Given that the first type parameter of our articleSelection is { attributes | title : Attribute String }, our Schema will likely itself have this record of Attributes. Let's take a look!

Schema

In theory, we could pass anything as the second parameter to the PG.schema function, but in practice this value will always be an Elm record of Attributes.

articleSchema :
    Schema x
        { title : Attribute String
        , body : Attribute String
        , favoritesCount : Attribute Int
        }
articleSchema =
    PG.schema "articles"
        { title = PG.string "title"
        , body = PG.string "body"
        , favoritesCount = PG.int "favorites_count"
        }
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PG.schema takes a String which corresponds to the path to our resource (ex: example.com/api/articles) and a record of Attributes. This record of Attributes describes the capabilities of a data model. In our specific case, it describes what we are able to select!

Let's take a look at how Schema and PG.schema are defined internally:

type Schema id attributes
    = Schema String attributes

schema : String -> attributes -> Schema id attributes
schema name attrs =
    Schema name attrs
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At first glance, we'll see that a Schema is nothing more than a wrapper around a record of Attributes. And this is true, but it's important to highlight that it's an opaque wrapper around a record of Attributes. It may not be immediately obvious, but it is this API that guides users towards a separation of the description of capabilities (Schema) from the building of requests (Selection). A user can't just write something like PG.field mySchema.title because the record is wrapped, and a user can't just unwrap the Schema because it's opaque! They are forced to use the functions provided by the package to compose things (namely PG.field). This API guides users towards writing selections in terms of an eventual record of attributes!

Hopefully the previous explanation sheds a bit of light on why PG.field takes a dot accessor for an Attribute rather than an Attribute directly.

Before moving on, let's review a few of these type signatures side by side:

PG.readAll : Schema id attributes -> Selection attributes a -> Request (List a)


articleSelection :
    Selection
        { attributes
            | title : Attribute String
        }
        String


articleSchema :
    Schema x
        { title : Attribute String
        , body : Attribute String
        , favoritesCount : Attribute Int
        }
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Just take a moment to take this all in. It's pretty cool how the pieces fit together, and we can thank Elm's extensible record system for that!

Just to wrap things up for those who are curious, there exists a function of type PG.toHttpRequest : PG.Request -> Http.Request. From there you can convert to a Task with Http.toTask or directly to a Cmd with Http.send.

Conclusion

Did we meet our design goals?

Yes! In our example, we built a request to read all the titles (Request Builder) of our article collection resource (Schema Representation) as opposed to making an HTTP GET request to the api/articles?select=title URL (Transfer Protocol) and decoding the JSON response (Interchange Format). The former is how we expressed our request in the example, and the latter is an implementation detail.

What has this design bought us?

  1. Type Safety
  2. Reuse

Type Safety

If the Schema is valid, our Request will be valid. Our Selection is defined in terms of a Schema, and we can only construct a Request if the Schema and Selection agree statically. Put another way, a subset of request building errors become static errors rather than logic errors.

For example, let's say we mistype .title when we're constructing our Selection. If our Schema correctly describes our remote resource, we'll get a nice compiler message. Let's take a look at that error message!

The definition of `articleSelection` does not match its type annotation.

18| articleSelection :
19|     Selection
20|         { attributes
21|             | title : Attribute String
22|         }
23|         String
24| articleSelection =
25|>    PG.field .titl

The type annotation for `articleSelection` says it is a:

    Selection { attributes | title : ... } String

But the definition (shown above) is a:

    Selection { b | titl : ... } a
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Pretty cool. However...

Close readers will argue that we've just moved the logic error to the Schema from the Decoder. This is true, however, the difference is that we only have 1 Schema for an entire entity as opposed to a Decoder for each way we wish to decode the entity. A Schema represents a single source of truth for all Selection capabilities of a remote resource. This in turn reduces the surface area of decoding logic errors.

So, in summary: If the Schema is valid, our Request will be valid.

Reuse

A Selection can be reused to construct Requests with any Schema that has the proper Attributes! For example, if our remote data server had both article resources and book resources:

articleSchema :
    Schema x
        { title : Attribute String
        , body : Attribute String
        , favoritesCount : Attribute Int
        }
articleSchema =
    PG.schema "articles"
        { title = PG.string "title"
        , body = PG.string "body"
        , favoritesCount = PG.int "favorites_count"
        }


bookSchema :
    Schema x
        { title : Attribute String
        , pages : Attribute Int
        , authorName : Attribute String
        }
bookSchema =
    PG.schema "books"
        { title = PG.string "title"
        , pages = PG.int "pages"
        , authorName = PG.string "author_name"
        }
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We could use the same Selection:

titleSelection :
    Selection
        { attributes
            | title : Attribute String
        }
        String
titleSelection =
    PG.field .title
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To construct our 2 separate requests:

getArticles : Request (List String)
getArticles =
    PG.readAll articleSchema titleSelection

getBooks : Request (List String)
getBooks =
    PG.readAll bookSchema titleSelection
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Pretty cool. However...

To be completely honest, I have not yet had a need for this reuse feature. With that being said, there's still something about it that makes the API feel right.

So, in summary: Extensible records in Selection API grant us reuse.

Which ideas could find their way into similar projects?

  • Schema as single source of truth for Selection capabilities
  • Separation of Schema and Selection
  • Extensible records central to design of this separation
  • Selection API similar to that of Decoder API
  • And more.. we'll discuss those in the future posts

Future

In the interest of space, time and boredom, I have not included all of the API designs of the elm-postgrest package in this post. In the future, I may write posts to highlight the concepts which were left out here. For example:

  • Combining Selections
  • Schema Relationships and Embedding Selections
  • Conditions and Orders
  • Create, Update, and Delete

Thanks for reading.

If you'd like to view some more simple examples, here's a link to the examples on github. Take a look at each individual git commit.

If you'd like to see a more "RealWorld" example application, here's a link to john-kelly/elm-postgrest-spa-example.

If you're interested in taking a look at the development of john-kelly/elm-postgrest, head over to the dev branch.

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