guardrail-dev / guardrail-dev/guardrail

Extensible enums

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#93 12 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
enhancement help wanted scala
Dominant language
Scala
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Description

For interoperation with poorly specced or flexible downstream APIs, clients should be able to represent a branch of an enumeration that isn't known. This permits accepting unknown branches and doing work with them without rejecting the response from client calls (currently, enumeration lookup failures result in a decoder failure for clients).

Currently, generated enumerations look like this:

```scala
sealed abstract class Foo(val value: String) { override def toString: String = value.toString }
object Foo {
object members {
case object Bar extends Foo("Bar")
}
val Bar: Foo = members.Bar
val values = Vector(Bar)
def parse(value: String): Option[Foo] = values.find(_.value == value)
implicit val encodeFoo: Encoder[Foo] = Encoder[String].contramap(_.value)
implicit val decodeFoo: Decoder[Foo] = Decoder[String].emap(value => parse(value).toRight(s"$value not a member of Foo"))
implicit val addPathFoo: AddPath[Foo] = AddPath.build(_.value)
implicit val showFoo: Show[Foo] = Show.build(_.value)
}
```

A possible alteration to accept unknown members (currently unsure if this should be opt-in or opt-out, definitely needs more thought):

```diff
@@ -2,10 +2,12 @@
object Foo {
object members {
case object Bar extends Foo("Bar")
+ class Unknown private[Foo] (value: String) extends Foo(value)
}
val Bar: Foo = members.Bar
+ def Unknown(value: String): Foo = new members.Unknown(value)
val values = Vector(Bar)
- def parse(value: String): Option[Foo] = values.find(_.value == value)
+ def parse(value: String): Option[Foo] = values.find(_.value == value).orElse(new members.Unknown(value))
implicit val encodeFoo: Encoder[Foo] = Encoder[String].contramap(_.value)
implicit val decodeFoo: Decoder[Foo] = Decoder[String].emap(value => parse(value).toRight(s"$value not a member of Foo"))
implicit val addPathFoo: AddPath[Foo] = AddPath.build(_.value)
```

Initially I thought the `Unknown` branch should not expose a constructor, as it would prevent invalid data from being supplied by the clients into downstream services. This has the unfortunate side-effect of not allowing services to round-trip to persistence layers; consider receiving values of an array via client API call, writing those values into a database, then attempting to use those values to make future API calls.

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