Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Constraints and Types (in Moose)

Moose::Manual::Type says that Moose types are mostly just constraints with a name. When designing new constraints API for Formhandler we decided to use Moose types - but with some playing around it also exposed the fact that not all constraints are types. I am not an expert in Type Theory - but I checked wikipedia and it seems to support my intuition that type is an attribute of data value - while when validating we often need to check not just the value - but also it's relation to the whole system.


If that is not yet clear - let's take the example of checking the age of a application user (from his provided birth date). The question if a user with a given birth date can legally participate in a web forum cannot be answered without knowing what is current date - it is not a property of the birth date alone - but of it's relation to the current date. I think that using the term 'type' for this kind of constraints can be confusing, even though technically in Moose this is possible to declare this.

Saturday, April 04, 2009

Roles for FormHandler

This is a more concrete version of the question from my last post. This is a form defined in FormHandler:

package BookDB::Form::BookWithOwner;

use HTML::FormHandler::Moose;
extends 'HTML::FormHandler::Model::DBIC';

has '+item_class' => ( default => 'Author' );

has_field 'title' => ( type => 'Text', required => 1 );
has_field 'publisher' => ( type => 'Text', required => 1 );
has_field 'owner' => ( type => 'BookDB::Form::BookOwner' );

This should be quite self-explanatory for anyone working with forms (and DBIC).
Now - I think Model::DBIC should be just a role here, but that is just a side track. The real question is about the fields here - ideally I would want that doing:

with 'HTML::FormHandler::Model::DBIC';

(this is after it is made a Role) - would add appriopriate methods to the fields - an example here could be validation of fields that need a unique value. I would like to not need to change the definitions above to:

has_field 'title' => ( type => 'Text::DBIC', required => 1 );

Fields like 'owner' above which are Compound fields and work mostly like a form itself and need to load the options for SELECT boxes from the model, set the values of fields from a database row etc:

package BookDB::Form::BookOwner;

use HTML::FormHandler::Moose;
extends 'HTML::FormHandler::Field::Compound';
with 'HTML::FormHandler::Model::DBIC';

has '+item_class' => ( default => 'User' );

has_field 'user_name';
has_field 'fav_cat' => ( label => 'Favorite Book Category' );
has_field 'fav_book' => ( label => 'Favorite Book' );
has_field 'occupation';
has_field 'country' => ( type => 'Select' );


Ideally this definition should not need 'HTML::FormHandler::Model::DBIC' - applying this role to the root form should be enough.