scouchdb Views now interoperable with Scala Objects

In one of the mail exchanges that I had with Dick Wall before the scouchdb demonstration at JavaOne ScriptBowl, Dick asked me the following ..

"Can I return an actual car object instead of a string description? It would be killer if I can actually show some real car sale item objects coming back from the database instead of the string description."

Yes, Dick, you can, now. scouchdb now offers APIs for returning Scala objects directly from couchdb views. Here's an example with Dick's CarSaleItem object model ..

// CarSaleItem class
@BeanInfo
case class CarSaleItem(make : String, model : String, 
  price : BigDecimal, condition : String, color : String) {

  def this(make : String, model : String, 
    price : Int, condition : String, color : String) =
    this(make, model, BigDecimal.int2bigDecimal(price), condition, color)

  private [db] def this() = this(null, null, 0, null, null)

  override def toString = "A " + condition + " " + color + " " + 
    make + " " + model + " for $" + price
}


The following map function returns the car make as the key and the car price as the value ..

// map function
val redCarsPrice =
  """(doc: dispatch.json.JsValue) => {
        val (id, rev, car) = couch.json.JsBean.toBean(doc, 
          classOf[couch.db.CarSaleItem]);
        if (car.color.contains("Red")) List(List(car.make, car.price)) else Nil
  }"""


This is exciting. The following map function returns the car make as the key and the car object as the value ..

// map function
val redCars =
  """(doc: dispatch.json.JsValue) => {
        val (id, rev, car) = couch.json.JsBean.toBean(doc, 
          classOf[couch.db.CarSaleItem]);
        if (car.color.contains("Red")) List(List(car.make, car)) else Nil
  }"""


And now some regular view setup code that registers the views in the CouchDB design document.

// view definitions
val redCarsView = new View(redCars, null)
val redCarsPriceView = new View(redCarsPrice, null)

// handling design document stuff
val cv = DesignDocument("car_views", null, Map[String, View]())
cv.language = "scala"

val rcv = 
  DesignDocument(cv._id, null, 
    Map("red_cars" -> redCarsView, "red_cars_price" -> redCarsPriceView))
rcv.language = "scala"
couch(Doc(carDb, rcv._id) add rcv)


The following query returns JSON corresponding to the car objects being returned from the view ..

val ls1 = couch(carDb view(
  Views builder("car_views/red_cars") build))


On the client side, we can do a simple map over the collection that converts the returned collection into a collection of the specific class objects .. Here we have a collection of CarSaleItem objects ..

import dispatch.json.Js._;
val objs =
  ls1.map { car =>
    val x = Symbol("value") ? obj
    val x(x_) = car
    JsBean.toBean(x_, classOf[CarSaleItem])._3
  }
objs.size should equal(3)
objs.map(_.make).sort((e1, e2) => (e1 compareTo e2) < 0) 
  should equal(List("BMW", "Geo", "Honda"))


But it gets better than this .. we can now have direct Scala objects being fetched from the view query directly through scouchdb API ..

// ls1 is now a list of CarSaleItem objects
val ls1 = couch(carDb view(
  Views builder("car_views/red_cars") build, classOf[CarSaleItem]))
ls1.map(_.make).sort((e1, e2) => (e1 compareTo e2) < 0) 
  should equal(List("BMW", "Geo", "Honda"))


Note the class being passed as an additional parameter in the view API. Similar stuff is also being supported for views having reduce functions. This makes scouchdb more seamless for interoperability between JSON storage layer and object based application layer.

Have a look at the project home page and the associated test case for details ..