Refactoring to Protocols

• Refactoring to Protocols

Episode #365 | 12 minutes | published on November 29, 2018 | Uses Xcode-10.0, swift-4.2, Vapor-3.0.8, fluent-postgresql-1.0.0

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In the last 2 episodes we added some behavior to add automatically managed timestamp fields and some fairly complex logic to set up UUID primary keys the way we want. Now if we want to share those, or make them the default for our models, we currently have to copy & paste. In this episode we will refactor this logic into reusable protocols so that our work can be applied on any model we wish easily.

This episode is part of a series: Server-side Swift with Vapor.

1. Getting Started with Vapor 12 min

2. Vapor Routing 14 min

3. Leaf Templates 13 min

4. Nesting Templates and Partials 8 min

5. Vapor Demo: Tokenizr 21 min

6. Setting up a Database with Fluent 19 min

7. Creating, Updating, and Deleting Records with Fluent 19 min

8. Vapor Futures 20 min

9. Setting up Vapor with Postgresql 17 min

10. UUID Primary Keys 13 min

11. Timestamp Fields 4 min

12. Refactoring to Protocols 12 min

13. Parent Child Relationships and Foreign Keys 14 min

14. Pivot Tables for Many to Many Relationships 14 min

15. Vapor Controllers 15 min

16. Decoding Request Parameters 9 min

Creating an Issue Model

Let's create a new model for storing Issues for our project:

final class Issue : Model {

    // A bunch of boilerplate copied from Project

    static var name: String = "issues"

    enum Status : String, PostgreSQLEnum {
        case open
        case closed
        case wontFix
    }


    var id: UUID?
    var createdAt: Date?
    var updatedAt: Date?

    var subject: String
    var body: String
    var status: Status = .open
}

Having to copy & paste a bunch of code to make our models consistent isn't ideal. Let's extract some of this logic so we can reuse it.

Extracting a Protocol For UUID Primary Keys

protocol UUIDModel : Model, PostgreSQLTable where Self.ID == UUID, Self.Database == PostgreSQLDatabase {
    var id: UUID? { get set }
}

extension UUIDModel {
    static var idKey: IDKey { return \.id }
}

Here you can see we're defining our primary key property and also declaring that this uses a Postgres database.

Extracting the UUID migration logic into a helper

Most of the customized logic is actually when we run our migrations. If we extract this into a protocol on any type that implements UUIDModel, we can easily reuse this in other models.

extension SchemaCreator where Model : UUIDModel {
    func uuidPrimaryKey() {
        let pk = PostgreSQLColumnConstraint.primaryKey(default: nil, identifier: nil)
        let defaultUUID = PostgreSQLColumnConstraint.default(.function("uuid_generate_v4"), identifier: nil)
        field(for: \.id, type: .uuid, pk, defaultUUID)
    }
}

Extracting a Protocol For Timestamps

Next let's look at extracting the timestamp logic.

protocol TimestampModel : Model {
    var createdAt: Date? { get set }
    var updatedAt: Date? { get set }
}

extension TimestampModel {
    static var createdAtKey: TimestampKey? { return \.createdAt }
    static var updatedAtKey: TimestampKey? { return \.updatedAt }
}

And again, we can do the same trick above to make the migrations easier:

extension SchemaCreator where Model : TimestampModel {
    func timestampFields() {
        field(for: \.createdAt)
        field(for: \.updatedAt)
    }
}

Cleaning up our models

If we look at Project.swift now, it looks a lot cleaner:

final class Project : UUIDModel, TimestampModel {
    static var name: String = "projects"

    var id: UUID?
    var title: String
    var description: String

    var createdAt: Date?
    var updatedAt: Date?

    init(title: String, description: String) {
        self.title = title
        self.description = description
    }
}

extension Project : Migration {
    static func prepare(on conn: PostgreSQLConnection) -> Future<Void> {
        return PostgreSQLDatabase.create(self, on: conn) { builder in

            builder.uuidPrimaryKey()
            builder.field(for: \.title, type: .varchar(500))
            builder.field(for: \.description)            
            builder.timestampFields()

        }
    }
}

We are also set up to use this on any of our models going forward, keeping things consistent.

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