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In a previous post I described the Resemblance idiom. In this post I present a class that can be used to automate the process of creating a Resemblance.

The Resemblance idiom enables you to write readable unit tests, but the disadvantage is that you will have to write (and maintain) quite a few test-specific Resemblance classes. If you're a Coding Neat Freak like me, you'll also have to override GetHashCode in every Resemblance, just because you're overriding Equals. If you're still looking for ways to torment yourself, you'll realize that the typical Resemblance implementation of Equals contains branching logic, so ideally, it should be unit tested too. (Yes, I do occasionally unit test my unit testing helper classes. AutoFixture, which is essentially one big unit test helper, is currently covered by some three thousand tests.)

In that light, wouldn't it be nice if you were able to automate the process of defining Resemblance classes? With the Likeness class, you can. Likeness is currently bundled with AutoFixture, so you get it if you install the AutoFixture NuGet package or if you download the AutoFixture zip file from its CodePlex site. The Likeness class can be found in an assembly named Ploeh.SemanticComparison. In the future, I plan on packaging this as a separate NuGet package, but currently, it's included with AutoFixture.

Likeness #

Before I show you how to turn a Likeness into a Resemblance, I think a very short introduction to Likeness is in order. A couple of years ago I introduced Likeness on my blog, but I think a re-introduction is in order. In the context of the unit test from the previous blog post, instead of manually writing a test like this:

[Theory, AutoWebData]
public void PostSendsOnChannel(
    [Frozen]Mock<IChannel<RequestReservationCommand>> channelMock,
    BookingController sut,
    BookingViewModel model)
{
    sut.Post(model);
 
    var expected = model.MakeReservation();
    channelMock.Verify(c =>
        c.Send(It.Is<RequestReservationCommand>(cmd =>
            cmd.Date == expected.Date &&
            cmd.Email == expected.Email &&
            cmd.Name == expected.Name &&
            cmd.Quantity == expected.Quantity)));
}

Likeness will do it for you, using Reflection to match properties according to name and type. By default, Likeness compares all properties of the destination instance. This will not work in this test, because the RequestReservationCommand also includes an Id property which is a Guid which is never going to be the same across different instances:

public MakeReservationCommand(
    DateTime date, string email, string name, int quantity)
{
    this.date = date;
    this.email = email;
    this.name = name;
    this.quantity = quantity;
    this.id = Guid.NewGuid();
}

Notice that the above test exludes the Id property. It's not very clear that this is going on, so a Test Reader may think that this is an accidental omission. With Likeness, this becomes explicit:

[Theory, AutoWebData]
public void PostSendsOnChannel(
    [Frozen]Mock<IChannel<MakeReservationCommand>> channelMock,
    BookingController sut,
    BookingViewModel model)
{
    sut.Post(model);
    var expected = model.MakeReservation()
        .AsSource().OfLikeness<MakeReservationCommand>()
        .Without(d => d.Id);
    channelMock.Verify(c =>
        c.Send(It.Is<MakeReservationCommand>(x =>
            expected.Equals(x))));
}

Notice how the Without method explicitly states that the Id property should be excluded from the comparison. By convention, all other properties on the target type (MakeReservationCommand, which in this case is the same as the source type) must be equal to each other.

The AsSource().OfLikeness extension method chain creates an instance of Likeness<MakeReservationCommand, MakeReservationCommand>, which isn't the same as an instance of MakeReservationCommand. Thus, you are still forced to use the slightly awkward It.Is syntax to express what equality means:

channelMock.Verify(c =>
    c.Send(It.Is<MakeReservationCommand>(x =>
        expected.Equals(x))));

If a Likeness could be used as a Resemblance, the test would be more readable.

Likeness as Resemblance #

The definition of the Likeness class is this:

public class Likeness<TSource, TDestination> : IEquatable<TDestination>

While it implements IEquatable<TDestination> it isn't a TDestination. That's the reason for the It.Is syntax above.

Thanks to awesome work by Nikos Baxevanis, a Likeness instance can create a dynamic proxy of TDestination, as long as TDestination is non-sealed and doesn't seal the Equals method. The method is called CreateProxy:

public TDestination CreateProxy();

This effectively turns the Likeness into a Resemblance by dynamically emitting a derived class that overrides Equals in the way that the Likeness instance (re)defines equality. With that, you can rewrite the unit test so that it's both readable and maintainable:

[Theory, AutoWebData]
public void PostSendsOnChannel(
    [Frozen]Mock<IChannel<RequestReservationCommand>> channelMock,
    BookingController sut,
    BookingViewModel model)
{
    sut.Post(model);
 
    var expected = model.MakeReservation()
        .AsSource().OfLikeness<RequestReservationCommand>()
        .Without(d => d.Id)
        .CreateProxy();
    channelMock.Verify(c => c.Send(expected));
}

The only difference in the definition of the expected variable is the additional call to CreateProxy. This changes the type of expected so that it's no longer Likeness<MakeReservationCommand, MakeReservationCommand>, but rather MakeReservationCommand (actually, a dynamically created sub-type of MakeReservationCommand). This enables you to write a readable assertion:

channelMock.Verify(c => c.Send(expected));

This is exactly the same assertion as the assertion used with the Resemblance idiom described in the previous post. Thus, Likeness has now been turned into a Resemblance, and you no longer have to manually create and maintain concrete Resemblance classes.

Comments

In this post I describe a unit testing trick which can be used to make assertions more readable.

Many TDD or unit testing experts (e.g. Roy Osherove) give the advice that a unit test should only contain a single assertion. This is a pretty good piece of advice, but sometimes a single assertion is best interpreted as a single logical assertion.

When it comes to state-based testing, you can often write a Custom Assertion to encapsulate multiple assertions into a single logical assertion. For interaction-based testing (i.e. using mock objects) this can be a bit harder.

In order to write readable unit tests with single assertions, I sometimes use an idiom that I'll describe here. Since I've never seen it described anywhere else, I can't reasonably call it a design pattern, so I'll stick with the less universal term idiom - I call it the Resemblance idiom. In short, it introduces a test-specific override of an object's equality method.

Motivating example #

Assume that you're TDD'ing this method:

[HttpPost]
public ViewResult Post(BookingViewModel model)
{
    this.channel.Send(model.MakeReservation());
    return this.View("Receipt", model);
}

Obviously, when TDD'ing, the method isn't going to have any implementation before the test has been written, but for educational purposes, in this case I'm showing you the implementation before the test - I still wrote the tests first. This is the implementation you'd like to arrive at - particularly this line of code:

this.channel.Send(model.MakeReservation());

The challenge here is that the MakeReservation method returns an instance of RequestReservationCommand, which is a data-carrying class (some would call it a DTO) that doesn't override Equals. One option is to override Equals, but that would lead to Equality Pollution, since the equality semantics of RequestReservationCommand isn't going to match what you need in order to write the test.

Using Moq, your first take might look something like this:

[Theory, AutoWebData]
public void PostSendsOnChannel(
    [Frozen]Mock<IChannel<RequestReservationCommand>> channelMock,
    BookingController sut,
    BookingViewModel model)
{
    sut.Post(model);
 
    var expected = model.MakeReservation();
    channelMock.Verify(c =>
        c.Send(It.Is<RequestReservationCommand>(cmd =>
            cmd.Date == expected.Date &&
            cmd.Email == expected.Email &&
            cmd.Name == expected.Name &&
            cmd.Quantity == expected.Quantity)));
}

This works, but is awkward. First of all, I'd prefer a more readable test than this. Secondly, what happens if, in the future, someone adds a new property to the RequestReservationCommand class? If you have a lot of tests like this one, should they all be updated to include the new property in the comparison?

Attempted fix #

The first fix you might attempt involves extracting the comparison to a helper method like this one:

private static bool Equals(RequestReservationCommand expected,
    RequestReservationCommand actual)
{
    return actual.Date == expected.Date &&
        actual.Email == expected.Email &&
        actual.Name == expected.Name &&
        actual.Quantity == expected.Quantity;
}

This is better because at least it gives you a central method where you can manage which properties should be included in the comparison, but from a test invocation perspective it's still a bit unwieldy:

[Theory, AutoWebData]
public void PostSendsOnChannel(
    [Frozen]Mock<IChannel<RequestReservationCommand>> channelMock,
    BookingController sut,
    BookingViewModel model)
{
    sut.Post(model);
 
    var expected = model.MakeReservation();
    channelMock.Verify(c =>
        c.Send(It.Is<RequestReservationCommand>(cmd =>
            Equals(expected, cmd))));
}

You're still stuck with the It.Is noise and a lambda expression. Being a static helper method, it's also not very object-oriented. Perhaps you don't care about that, but by not being object-oriented, it's also not very composable. This can come back to bite you if you want to compare complex object graphs, because it's dificult to compose static methods. There's a another way which provides a better alternative.

Resemblance #

The trick is to recall that ultimately, most unit testing is about determining whether the actual outcome is equal to the expected outcome. Since the Equals method is virtual, you can simply create a test-specific child class that overrides the Equals method. This is what I call a Resemblance.

private class RequestReservationCommandResemblance : RequestReservationCommand
{
    public RequestReservationCommandResemblance(RequestReservationCommand source)
        : base(source.Date, source.Email, source.Name, source.Quantity)
    {
    }
 
    public override bool Equals(object obj)
    {
        var other = obj as RequestReservationCommand;
        if (other != null)
            return object.Equals(this.Date, other.Date)
                && object.Equals(this.Email, other.Email)
                && object.Equals(this.Name, other.Name)
                && object.Equals(this.Quantity, other.Quantity);
 
        return base.Equals(obj);
    }
 
    public override int GetHashCode()
    {
        return this.Date.GetHashCode()
            ^ this.Email.GetHashCode()
            ^ this.Name.GetHashCode()
            ^ this.Quantity.GetHashCode();
    }
}

Notice that the RequestReservationCommandResemblance class derives from RequestReservationCommand in order to override Equals (and GetHashCode for good measure). This looks a bit more complicated than the previous attempt at a fix, but it's much more object-oriented and composable, and most importantly: the test is much easier to read because almost all the noise can be removed:

[Theory, AutoWebData]
public void PostSendsOnChannel(
    [Frozen]Mock<IChannel<RequestReservationCommand>> channelMock,
    BookingController sut,
    BookingViewModel model)
{
    sut.Post(model);
    var expected = new RequestReservationCommandResemblance(model.MakeReservation());
    channelMock.Verify(c => c.Send(expected));
}

Notice in particular how you're now able to state exactly what you care about, instead of how you care about it:

channelMock.Verify(c => c.Send(expected));

You may still feel that the overhead of creating a new test-specific class just for this purpose doesn't quite justify the increased readability and composability, but stay tuned - I have more tricks to show you.

Comments

In previous posts, I've walked through the first two user stories of the Bank OCR kata in F#. In this post I'll walk through my implementation of user stories 3 and 4.

The reason I'm collecting both user stories in a single blog post is that the requirements of user story 4 represent a change from user story 3, and since I didn't use a DVCS for this kata, I no longer have my implementation for user story 3.

The core unit test #

As with the previous user stories, I started by writing a Parameterized Test:

[<Theory>]
[<InlineData("
    _  _     _  _  _  _  _ 
  | _| _||_||_ |_   ||_||_|
  ||_  _|  | _||_|  ||_| _|", "123456789")>]
[<InlineData("
 _     _  _  _  _  _  _  _ 
 _||_||_ |_||_| _||_||_ |_ 
 _|  | _||_||_||_ |_||_| _|", "345882865")>]
[<InlineData("
 _     _  _  _  _  _       
 _||_||_ |_||_| _||_|  ||_|
 _|  | _||_||_||_ |_|  |  |", "345882814")>]
[<InlineData("
    _  _     _  _  _  _  _ 
  | _| _||_||_ |_   ||_||_|
  ||_  _|  | _||_|  ||_||_|", "123456789")>]
[<InlineData("
    _  _     _  _  _  _  _ 
  | _| _||_||_ |_   ||_||_|
  | _| _|  | _||_|  ||_||_|", "133456788 AMB ['133456188', '193456788']")>]
[<InlineData("
    _  _     _  _  _  _  _ 
  | _| _||_||_ |_   ||_|| |
  | _| _|  | _||_|  ||_||_|", "133456780 ERR")>]
[<InlineData("
 _     _  _  _  _  _       
 _||_||_ |_||_| _||_|  ||_|
 _|| | _||_||_||_ |_|  |  |", "345882814")>]
[<InlineData("
 _  _        _  _     _  _ 
|_||_   |  || | _| _  _||_ 
|_||_|  |  ||_|   |_| _||_|", "86110??36 ILL")>]
[<InlineData("
 _     _  _  _  _  _       
 _||_||_ |_||_| _||_|  ||_|
 _|  | _||  |_|   |_|  |  |", "345?8?814 ILL")>]
[<InlineData("
 
  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |", "711111111")>]
[<InlineData("
 _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _ 
  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |", "777777177")>]
[<InlineData("
 _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _ 
 _|| || || || || || || || |
|_ |_||_||_||_||_||_||_||_|", "200800000")>]
[<InlineData("
 _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _ 
 _| _| _| _| _| _| _| _| _|
 _| _| _| _| _| _| _| _| _|", "333393333")>]
[<InlineData("
 _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _ 
|_||_||_||_||_||_||_||_||_|
|_||_||_||_||_||_||_||_||_|", "888888888 AMB ['888886888', '888888880', '888888988']")>]
[<InlineData("
 _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _ 
|_ |_ |_ |_ |_ |_ |_ |_ |_ 
 _| _| _| _| _| _| _| _| _|", "555555555 AMB ['559555555', '555655555']")>]
[<InlineData("
 _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _ 
|_ |_ |_ |_ |_ |_ |_ |_ |_ 
|_||_||_||_||_||_||_||_||_|\r\n", "666666666 AMB ['686666666', '666566666']")>]
[<InlineData("
 _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _ 
|_||_||_||_||_||_||_||_||_|
 _| _| _| _| _| _| _| _| _|", "999999999 AMB ['993999999', '999959999', '899999999']")>]
[<InlineData("
    _  _  _  _  _  _     _ 
|_||_|| || ||_   |  |  ||_ 
  | _||_||_||_|  |  |  | _|", "490067715 AMB ['490067115', '490867715', '490067719']")>]
[<InlineData("
    _  _     _  _  _  _  _ 
 _| _| _||_||_ |_   ||_||_|
  ||_  _|  | _||_|  ||_| _|", "123456789")>]
[<InlineData("
 _     _  _  _  _  _  _    
| || || || || || || ||_   |
|_||_||_||_||_||_||_| _|  |", "000000051")>]
[<InlineData("
    _  _  _  _  _  _     _ 
|_||_|| ||_||_   |  |  | _ 
  | _||_||_||_|  |  |  | _|", "490867715")>]
let ParseToPrintoutReturnsCorrectResult entry expected =
    entry
    |> ParseToPrintout
    |> should equal expected

Once again the test utilizes xUnit.net's data theories feature to decouple the test code from the test data, as well as FsUnit for the assertion DSL.

The test is really simple: it's 85 lines of data and three lines of code which state that the result of piping the entry argument to the ParseToPrintout function should be equal to the expected argument.

Implementation #

The implementation may seem more daunting. At first, I'll post the function in its entirety, and afterwards I'll break it down and walk you through it.

let ParseToPrintout entry =
    let toPrintable opt =
        match opt with
        | Some(d) -> d.ToString()
        | None -> "?"
 
    let formatEntry s =
        s
        |> ParseToDigits
        |> Seq.map toPrintable
        |> String.Concat    
 
    let isLegible potentialDigits = potentialDigits |> Seq.forall Option.isSome
 
    let isValidAndLegible s =
        let potentialDigits = s |> ParseToDigits
 
        (potentialDigits |> isLegible) &&
        (potentialDigits |> skipNones |> IsValid)
 
    if entry |> isValidAndLegible
    then entry |> formatEntry
    else
        let getCandidates chars =
            let withAlternatives c =
                seq {
                    match c with
                    | ' ' -> yield! [ '|'; '_' ]
                    | '|' | '_' -> yield ' '
                    | _ -> yield! []
                    }
 
            chars
            |> Seq.mapi (fun i _ -> chars
                                    |> ReplaceAt i withAlternatives)
            |> Seq.concat
 
        let validCandidates =
            entry.ToCharArray()
            |> getCandidates
            |> Seq.map ToString
            |> Seq.filter isValidAndLegible
            |> Seq.toList
 
        let formatAlternatives alternatives =
            alternatives
            |> Seq.map formatEntry
            |> Seq.map (sprintf "'%s'")
            |> Seq.reduce (sprintf "%s, %s")
 
        match validCandidates with
        | [head] -> head |> formatEntry
        | [] -> if entry |> ParseToDigits |> isLegible
                then entry |> formatEntry |> sprintf "%s ERR"
                else entry |> formatEntry |> sprintf "%s ILL"
        | _ -> validCandidates
                |> formatAlternatives
                |> sprintf "%s AMB [%s]" (formatEntry entry)

The first thing to notice is that the ParseToPrintout function is composed of quite a few helper functions. A thing that I currently don't like so much about F# is that it's necessary to define a function before it can be used, so all the helper functions must appear before the function that defines the general flow.

It's possible to move the helper functions to other modules so that they don't clutter the implementation, but most of the functions defined here seem to me to be a very specialized part of the overall implementation. In this particular code base, I've been working under the assumption that it would be best to define a function in as narrow a scope as possible, but looking at the result, I don't think that was the right decision. In the future, I think I'll move more helper functions to a separate module.

Valid and legible #

As a start, skim past the helper functions. The actual program flow of the function starts here:

if entry |> isValidAndLegible
then entry |> formatEntry

That part of the if/then branch should be fairly easy to understand. If the entry is valid (according to the checksum function from user story 2) and legible, the result is formatted and returned.

The isValidAndLegible function determines whether the entry is... well... valid and legible. The first thing it does is to pipe the string into the ParseToDigits function, which, you'll recall, returns a sequence of integer options.

To figure out whether those potential digits are legible it invokes the isLegible function, which I'll return to shortly.

In order to figure out whether the potential digits are valid, it invokes the IsValid method from user story 2. However, in order to do so, it needs to convert the sequence of integer options to a sequence of integers. It does that by invoking the skipNones helper method, that I defined in a helper module:

let skipNones sequence = Seq.collect Option.toArray sequence

This function takes a sequence of options and returns a sequence of values by skipping all the Nones. It does that by turning each option into an array of 0 or 1 elements and then concatenate all these arrays together to form a new sequence.

This array is piped into the IsValid function, which will only return true if there are exactly nine digits and the checksum is OK.

The isLegible function is simpler because all it needs to do is to verify that all the options are Somes (instead of Nones).

Formatting the entry #

The formatEntry function pipes the entry into the ParseToDigits function, which returns a sequence of integer options. Each option is mapped into a string, replacing each None with a "?".

Finally, the sequence of strings is concatenated into a single string by piping it to the built-in String.Concat method.

Finding candidates #

While formatting the entry is fairly easy if it's valid and legible, it suddenly becomes much harder to attempt to find other candidates if the entry seems invalid. What needs to be done in this case is to iterate through each and every character of the entry and try to replace just a single character at a time to see if it produces a better entry.

According to user story 4, a blank space could be either a vertical pipe or and underscore, while an underscore and a pipe might instead be a blank space. This relationship can be formalized by the withAlternatives function:

let withAlternatives c =
    seq {
        match c with
        | ' ' -> yield! [ '|'; '_' ]
        | '|' | '_' -> yield ' '
        | _ -> yield! []
        }

This function takes as input a single character and returns a sequence of characters. If the input is ' ', the output is a list containing '|' and '_'. On the other hand, if the input is either '|' or '_', the output is a sequence with the single element ' '. For all other characters (such as line breaks), the output is an empty sequence, indicating that no replacement should be attempted.

This defines the alternatives which can be fed into the ReplaceAt helper function:

let ReplaceAt index produceReplacements sequence =
    sequence
    |> Seq.nth index
    |> produceReplacements
    |> Seq.map (fun x -> sequence |> ReplaceElementAt index x)

In this case, the ReplaceAt function takes as input a sequence of characters (the entry string) and a function providing alternatives (withAlternatives) and produces a sequence of sequence of characters where only a single character has been replaced according to the alternatives.

If that sounds difficult, perhaps these unit tests explain the behavior better:

[<Fact>]
let ProduceAllReplacementsAtReturnsCorrectResult1() =
    let actual = ReplaceAt 0 (fun c -> [ 'I'; 'i' ]) "123"
    actual |> Seq.map ToString |> should equalSequence [ "I23"; "i23" ]
 
[<Fact>]
let ProduceAllReplacementsAtReturnsCorrectResult2() =
    let actual = ReplaceAt 1 (fun c -> [ 'V' ]) "153"
    actual |> Seq.map ToString |> should equalSequence [ "1V3" ]

The first unit tests replaces the first (zero-indexed) character in the input string "123" with two alternatives, 'I' and 'i', producing the output sequence of "I23" and "i23".

The second test replaces the second (zero-indexed) character in the input string "153" with the single alternative 'V' to produce the output "1V3".

The ReplaceAt function does this by first using the Seq.nth function to pick the nth character out of the sequence, and then pipe that character into the function that produces the alternatives. This produces a sequence of replacement characters, e.g. '|' and '_' as explained above.

This sequence of replacement characters is then used to produce a sequence of strings where the element at the index is replaced with each of the replacement characters. In order to do that, the original input is piped into the ReplaceElementAt helper function:

let ReplaceElementAt index element sequence =
    let beforeIndex = sequence |> Seq.take index
    let atIndex = element |> Seq.singleton
    let afterIndex = sequence |> Seq.skip (index + 1)
    afterIndex |> Seq.append atIndex |> Seq.append beforeIndex

This function takes a sequence of elements (e.g. a string) and returns another sequence (e.g. another string) by replacing the element at the specified index with the supplied element.

All these helper functions can be combined to produce a sequence of candidate strings:

chars
|> Seq.mapi (fun i _ -> chars
                        |> ReplaceAt i withAlternatives)
|> Seq.concat

Of these candidates, a lot will be invalid, but filtering them to find only the valid candidates is fairly easy:

let validCandidates =
    entry.ToCharArray()
    |> getCandidates
    |> Seq.map ToString
    |> Seq.filter isValidAndLegible
    |> Seq.toList

This final list of candidates is a list instead of a sequence because it enables me to use list pattern matching to deal with the cases of a single, none, or multiple valid alternatives:

match validCandidates with
| [head] -> head |> formatEntry
| [] -> if entry |> ParseToDigits |> isLegible
        then entry |> formatEntry |> sprintf "%s ERR"
        else entry |> formatEntry |> sprintf "%s ILL"
| _ -> validCandidates
        |> formatAlternatives
        |> sprintf "%s AMB [%s]" (formatEntry entry)

If there's only a single valid alternative, the [head] match is triggered and the decomposed head variable is simply piped to the formatEntry function.

If there's no valid alternative, the [] match is triggered, and the final formatting is then based on whether or not the entry is legible or not.

Finally, if there are multiple candidates, each is formatted and appended as ambiguous alternatives to the original (invalid) input.

In case you'd like to take an even closer look at the code, I've attached the entire solution as a zip file: KataBankOCR.zip (299.62 KB)

Comments

Following up on my initial post about the Bank OCR kata, this post walks through the code required to implement user story 2, which is about calculating a checksum.

The code I previously described already contains a function called ParseToDigits which returns a sequence of digits, so it seems reasonable to express the validation function as based on a sequence of digits as input.

The core unit test #

To ensure that the behavior of the new IsValid function would be correct, I wrote this Parameterized Test:

[<Theory>]
[<InlineData(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, true)>]
[<InlineData(3, 4, 5, 8, 8, 2, 8, 6, 5, true)>]
[<InlineData(3, 4, 5, 8, 8, 2, 8, 1, 4, true)>]
[<InlineData(7, 1, 5, 8, 8, 2, 8, 6, 4, true)>]
[<InlineData(7, 4, 5, 8, 8, 2, 8, 6, 5, false)>]
[<InlineData(7, 4, 5, 8, 8, 2, 8, 6, 9, false)>]
[<InlineData(7, 4, 5, 8, 8, 2, 8, 6, 8, false)>]
[<InlineData(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8, false)>]
[<InlineData(1, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8, false)>]
[<InlineData(1, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 0, false)>]
let IsValidReturnsCorrectResult d9 d8 d7 d6 d5 d4 d3 d2 d1 expected =
    seq { yield! [d9; d8; d7; d6; d5; d4; d3; d2; d1] }
    |> IsValid
    |> should equal expected

As was the case for the previous tests, this test utilizes xUnit.net's data theories feature to succinctly express a parameterized test, as well as FsUnit for the assertion DSL.

Once again I'd like to point out how the use of pipes enables me to very compactly follow the Arrange Act Assert (AAA) test pattern.

Implementation #

The IsValid function is very simple:

let IsValid digits =
    match digits |> Seq.toArray with
    | [| d9; d8; d7; d6; d5; d4; d3; d2; d1 |] ->
        (d1 + 2 * d2 + 3 * d3 + 4 * d4 + 5 * d5 + 6 * d6 + 7 * d7 + 8 * d8 + 9 * d9) % 11 = 0
    | _ -> false

The input sequence is converted to an array by piping it into the Seq.toArray function. The resulting array is then matched against an expected shape.

If the array contains exactly 9 elements, each element is decomposed into a named variable (d9, d8, etc.) and passed to the correct checksum formula. The formula only returns true if the calculated result is zero; otherwise it returns false.

If the input doesn't match the expected pattern, the return value is false. The following tests prove this:

[<Fact>]
let IsValidOfTooShortSequenceReturnsFalse() =
    seq { yield! [3; 4; 5; 8; 8; 2; 8; 6] }
    |> IsValid
    |> should equal false
 
[<Fact>]
let IsValidOfTooLongSequenceReturnsFalse() =
    seq { yield! [3; 4; 5; 8; 8; 2; 8; 6; 5; 7] }
    |> IsValid
    |> should equal false

In a future post I will walk you through user stories 3 and 4.

Comments

In case my previous post left readers in doubt about whether or not I like Functional Programming (FP), this post should make it clear that I (also) love FP.

A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of performing a technical review of Real World Functional Programming, which caused me to significantly shift my C# coding style towards a more functional style.

Now I want to take the next step, so I've started doing katas in F#. In a series of blog posts, I'll share my experiences with learning F# as I go along. I'm sure that the F# gods will wince from my code, but that's OK - if any of my readers find this educational, my goal will be met.

In this post I'll start out with the first use case of the Bank OCR kata.

The core unit test #

The first thing I wanted to do was write a couple of tests to demonstrate that I could parse the input. This Parameterized Test uses xUnit.net data theories and FsUnit for the assertion:

[<Theory>]
[<InlineData("
    _  _     _  _  _  _  _ 
  | _| _||_||_ |_   ||_||_|
  ||_  _|  | _||_|  ||_| _|", 123456789)>]
[<InlineData("
    _  _     _  _  _  _  _ 
  | _| _||_||_ |_   ||_||_|
  ||_  _|  | _||_|  ||_||_|", 123456788)>]
[<InlineData("
    _  _     _  _  _  _  _ 
  | _| _||_||_ |_   ||_||_|
  | _| _|  | _||_|  ||_||_|", 133456788)>]
[<InlineData("
    _  _     _  _  _  _  _ 
  | _| _||_||_ |_   ||_|| |
  | _| _|  | _||_|  ||_||_|", 133456780)>]
let ParseToNumberReturnsCorrectResult entry expected =
    entry
    |> ParseToNumber
    |> should equal expected

One of the many nice features of F# is that it's possible to break string literals over multiple lines, so instead of having one wide, unreadable string with "\r\n" instead of line breaks, I could write the test cases directly in the test source code and keep them legible.

In the test function body itself, I pipe the entry function argument into the ParseToNumber function using the pipeline operator |>, so

entry
|> ParseToNumber

is equivalent to writing

ParseToNumber entry

However, by piping the input into the SUT and the result further on to the assertion, I achieve a very dense test method where it's fairly clear that it follows the Arrange Act Assert (AAA) pattern.

The assertion is expressed using FsUnit's F# adapter over xUnit.net. It should be clear that it states that the result (piped from the ParseToNumber function) should be equal to the expected function argument.

Implementation #

Here's the body of the ParseToNumber function:

let ParseToNumber entry =
    entry
    |> ParseToDigits
    |> Seq.map Option.get
    |> Seq.reduce (fun x y -> x * 10 + y)

If you're used to read and write C# you may be wondering about the compactness of it all. Where are all the type declarations?

F# is a strongly typed language, but it has very sophisticated type inferencing capabilities, so the compiler is able to infer that the signature is string - > int, which (in this case) is read as a function which takes a string as input and returns an integer. The equivalent C# notation would be public int ParseToNumber(string entry).

How does the F# compiler know this?

The entry parameter is easy to infer because the function body invokes the ParseToDigits function, which takes a string as input. Therefore, entry must be a string as well.

The output type is a little harder to understand, but basically it boils down to something like this: the ParseToDigits function returns a sequence (basically, an IEnumerable<T>) of integer options. The Seq.map function converts this to a sequence of integers, and the Seq.fold function aggregates that sequence into a single integer.

Don't worry if you didn't understand all that yet - I'll walk you through the body of the function now.

The entry argument is piped into the ParseToDigits function, which returns a sequence of integer options. An option is a type that either has, or doesn't have, a value, so the next step is to unwrap all the values. This is done by piping the option sequence into the Seq.map function, which is equivalent to the LINQ Select method. The Option.get method simply unwraps a single option. It will throw an exception if the value is None, but in this implementation, this is the desired behavior.

The last thing to do is to aggregate the sequence of integers into a single number. The Seq.reduce method aggregates the sequence according to a given accumulator function.

In F#, an inline code block is written with the fun keyword, but it's entirely equivalent to a C# code block, which would look like this:

(x, y) => x * 10 + y

This function basically interprets the sequence of integers as a stream of digits, so in order to arrive at the correct digital representation of the number, each accumulated result is multiplied by ten and added to the new digit.

Obviously, all the real parsing takes place in the ParseToDigits function:

let ParseToDigits (entry : string) =
    let toIntOption ocrDigit =
        match ocrDigit |> Seq.toArray with
        | [| (' ', '|', '|'); ('_', ' ', '_'); (' ', '|', '|') |] -> Some 0
        | [| (' ', ' ', ' '); (' ', ' ', ' '); (' ', '|', '|') |] -> Some 1
        | [| (' ', ' ', '|'); ('_', '_', '_'); (' ', '|', ' ') |] -> Some 2
        | [| (' ', ' ', ' '); ('_', '_', '_'); (' ', '|', '|') |] -> Some 3
        | [| (' ', '|', ' '); (' ', '_', ' '); (' ', '|', '|') |] -> Some 4
        | [| (' ', '|', ' '); ('_', '_', '_'); (' ', ' ', '|') |] -> Some 5
        | [| (' ', '|', '|'); ('_', '_', '_'); (' ', ' ', '|') |] -> Some 6
        | [| (' ', ' ', ' '); ('_', ' ', ' '); (' ', '|', '|') |] -> Some 7
        | [| (' ', '|', '|'); ('_', '_', '_'); (' ', '|', '|') |] -> Some 8
        | [| (' ', '|', ' '); ('_', '_', '_'); (' ', '|', '|') |] -> Some 9
        | _ -> None
 
    let lines = entry.Split([| "\r\n" |], StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
 
    Seq.zip3 lines.[0] lines.[1] lines.[2]
    |> chunk 3
    |> Seq.map toIntOption

That may look scary, but is actually not that bad.

The function contains the nested function toIntOption which is local to the scope of ParseToDigits. One of the things I don't like that much about F# is that you have to declare and implement the details before the general flow, so you almost have to read the code backwards if you want the overview before diving into all the details.

The first thing the ParseToDigit function does is to split the input into three lines according to the specification of the kata. It uses the standard .NET String.Split method to do that.

Next, it zips each of these three lines with each other. When you zip something, you take the first element of each sequence and create a tuple out of those three elements; then the second element of each sequence, and so forth. The result is a sequence of tuples, where each tuple represents a vertical slice down a digit.

As an example, let's look at the digit 0:

 _ 
| |
|_|

The first vertical slice contains the characters ' ', '|' and '|' so that results in the tuple (' ', '|', '|'). The next vertical slice corresponds to the tuple ('_', ' ', '_') and the third (' ', '|', '|').

With me so far? OK, good.

The Seq.zip3 function produces a sequence of such tuples, but since the kata states that each digit is exactly three characters wide, it's necessary to divide that stream of tuples into chunks of three. In order to do that, I pipe the zipped sequence to the chunk function.

Seq.zip3 lines.[0] lines.[1] lines.[2]
|> chunk 3

I'll post the chunk function further down, but the result is a sequence of sequence of chars which can then be mapped with the toIntOption function.

Now that I've explained how those tuples look, the toIntOption shouldn't be too hard to understand. Each ocrDigit argument is expected to be a sequence of three tuples, so after creating an array from the sequence, the function uses pattern matching to match each tuple array to an option value.

It simply matches an array of the tuples (' ', '|', '|'); ('_', ' ', '_'); (' ', '|', '|') to the number 0 (as explained above), and so on.

If there's no match, it returns the option value None, instead of Some.

Hang on, I'm almost done. The last part of the puzzle is the chunk function:

let rec chunk size sequence =
    let skipOrEmpty size s =
        if s |> Seq.truncate size |> Seq.length >= size
        then s |> Seq.skip size
        else Seq.empty
 
    seq {
        yield sequence |> Seq.truncate size
 
        let next = sequence |> skipOrEmpty size
        if not (Seq.isEmpty next) then yield! chunk size next
        }

Just like the ParseToDigits function, the chunk function uses a nested function to do some of its work.

First of all you may notice that the function declaration uses the rec keyword, which means that this is a recursive function. FP is all about recursion, so this is just something you'll have to get used to.

The main part of the function consists of a sequence expression, denoted by the seq keyword.

First the function returns the first n elements from the sequence, in order to return the first chunk. Next, it skips that chuck and if the sequence isn't empty it recursively calls itself with the rest of the sequence.

The skipOrEmpty function is just a little helper function to work around the behavior of the Seq.skip function, which throws an exception if you ask it to skip some elements of a sequence which doesn't contain that many elements.

That's it. The code is actually quite compact, but I just took a long time explaining it all in some detail.

In a future post I'll walk through the other use cases of the Bank OCR kata.

Comments

This blog post makes the banal observation that design patterns tend to be intimately coupled to the paradigm in which they belong.

It seems as though lately it has become hip to dismiss design patterns as a bit of a crutch to overcome limitations in Object-Oriented Design (OOD). One example originates from The Joy of Clojure:

"In this section, we'll attempt to dissuade you from viewing Clojure features as design patterns [...] and instead as an inherent nameless quality.

"[...]the patterns described [in Design Patterns] are aimed at patching deficiencies in popular object-oriented programming languages. This practical view of design patterns isn't directly relevant to Clojure, because in many ways the patterns are ever-present and are first-class citizens of the language itself." (page 303)

From what little I've understood about Clojure, that seems like a reasonable assertion.

Another example is a tweet by Neal Swinnerton:

"With functions that accept functions and/or return functions 400 of the 600 pages of design patterns can be burnt says @stilkov ‪#euroclojure"

and Stefan Tilkov elaborates:

"@ploeh @sw1nn @ptrelford many OO DPs only exist to replace missing FP features in the first place"

First of all: I completely agree. In fact, I find these statements rather uncontroversial. The only reason I'm writing this is because I see this sentiment popping up more and more (but perhaps I'm just suffering from the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon).

Patterns for OOD #

Many 'traditional' design patterns describe how to solve problems which are complex when working with object-oriented languages. A lot of those problems are inherent in the object-oriented paradigm.

Other paradigms may provide inherent solutions to those problems. As an example, Functional Programming (FP) includes the central concept of Function Composition. Functions can be composed according to signature. In OOD terminology you can say that the signature of a function defines its type.

Most of the classic design patterns are based upon the idea of programming to an interface instead of a concrete class. In OOD, it's necessary to point this out as a piece of explicit advice because the default in OOD is to program against a concrete class.

That's not the case in FP because functions can be composed as long as their signatures are compatible. Loose coupling is, so to speak, baked into the paradigm.

Thus, it's true that many of the OOD patterns are irrelevant in an FP context. That doesn't mean that FP doesn't need patterns.

Patterns for FP #

So if FP (or Clojure, for that matter) inherently address many of the shortcomings of OOD that give rise to patterns, does it mean that design patterns are redundant in FP?

Hardly. This is reminiscent of the situation of a couple of years ago when Ruby on Rails developers were pointing fingers at everyone else because they had superior productivity, but now when they are being tasked with maintaining complex system, they are learning the hard way that Active Record is an anti-pattern. Duh.

FP has shortcomings as well, and patterns will emerge to address them. While FP has been around for a long time, it hasn't been as heavily used (and thus subjected to analysis) as OOD, so the patterns may not yet have been formulated yet, but if FP gains traction (and I believe it will), patterns will emerge. However, they will be different patterns.

Once we have an extensive body of patterns for FP, we'll be able to state the equivalent of the introductory assertion:

Most of the established FP patterns address shortcomings of FP. Using the FloopyDoopy paradigm makes most of them redundant.

What would be shortcomings of FP? I don't know them all, but here's a couple of suggestions:

Mutability #

Apart from calculation-intensive software, most software is actually all about mutating state: Take an order. Save to the database. Write a file. Send an email. Render a view. Print a document. Write to the console. Send a message...

In FP they've come up with this clever concept of monads to 'work around' the problem of mutating state. Yes, monads are very clever, but if they feel foreign in OOD it's because they're not required. Mutation is an inherent part of the OOD paradigm, and it very intuitively maps to the 'real world', where mutation happens all the time. Monads are cool, but not particularly intuitive.

FP practitioners may not realize this, but a monad is a design pattern invented to address a shortcoming in 'pure' functional languages.

Discoverability #

As Phil Trelford kindly pointed out at GOTO Copenhagen 2012, OOD is often characterized by 'dot-driven development.' What does that mean?

It means that given a variable, we can often just enter ".", and our IDE is going to give us a list of methods we can call on the object:

Since behavior is contained by each type, we can use patterns such as Fluent Interface to make it easy to learn a new API. While we can laugh at the term 'dot-driven development' it's hard to deny that it makes it very easy to learn.

The API itself carries the information about how to use it, and what is possible. That's very Clean Code. Out-of-band documentation isn't required.

I wouldn't even know how to address this shortcoming in FP, but I'm sure patterns will evolve.

Different paradigms require different patterns #

All of this boils down to a totally banal observation:

Most patterns address shortcomings specific to a paradigm

Saying that most of the OOD patterns are redundant in FP is like saying that you don't need oven mittens to pour a glass of water.

There might be a slight overlap, but I'd expect most patterns to be tightly coupled to the paradigm in which they were originally stated.

There might be a few patterns that are generally applicable.

The bottom line is that FP isn't inherently better just because many of the OOD design patterns are redundant. Neither is OOD inherently better. They are different. That's all.

Comments

Most guidance about Test-Driven Development (TDD) will tell you that unit tests should be fast. Examples of such guidance can be found in FIRST and xUnit Test Patterns. Rarely does it tell you how fast unit tests should be.

10 seconds for a unit test suite. Max.

Here's why.

When you follow the Red/Green/Refactor process, ideally you'd be running your unit test suite at least three times for each iteration:

1. Red. Run the test suite.
2. Green. Run the test suite.
3. Refactor. Run the test suite.

Each time you run the unit test suite, you're essentially blocked. You have to wait until the test run has completed until you get the result.

During that wait time, it's important to keep focus. If the test run takes too long, your mind starts to wonder, and you'll suffer from context switching when you have to resume work.

When does your mind start to wonder? After about 10 seconds. That number just keeps popping up when the topic turns to focused attention. Obviously it's not a hard limit. Obviously there are individual and contextual variations. Still, it seems as though a 10 second short-term attention span is more or less hard-wired into the human brain.

Thus, a unit test suite used for TDD should run in less than 10 seconds. If it's slower, you'll be less productive because you'll constantly lose focus.

Implications #

The test suite you work with when you do TDD should execute in less than 10 seconds on your machine. If you have hundreds of tests, each test should be faster than 100 milliseconds. If you have thousands, each test should be faster than 10 milliseconds. You get the picture.

That test suite doesn't need to be the same as is running on your CI server. It could be a subset of tests. That's OK. The TDD suite may just be part of your Test Pyramid.

Selective test runs #

Many people work around the Slow Tests anti-pattern by only running one test at a time, or perhaps one test class. In my experience, this is not an optimal solution because it slows you down. Instead of just going

1. Red
2. Run
3. Green
4. Run
5. Refactor
6. Run

you'd need to go

1. Red
2. Specifically instruct your Test Runner to run only the test you just wrote
3. Green
4. Decide which subset of tests may have been affected by the new test. This obviously involves the new test, but may include more tests.
5. Run the tests you just selected
6. Refactor
7. Decide which subset of tests to run now
8. Run the tests you just selected

Obviously, that introduces friction into your process. Personally, I much prefer to have a fast test suite that I can run all the time at a key press.

Still, there are tools available that promises to do this analysis for you. One of them are Mighty Moose, with which I've had varying degrees of success. Another similar approach is NCrunch.

References? #

For a long time I've been wanting to write this article, but I've always felt held back by a lack of citations I could exhibit. While the Wikipedia link does provide a bit of information, it's not that convincing in itself (and it also cites the time span as 8 seconds).

However, that 10 second number just keeps popping up in all sorts of contexts, not all of them having anything to do with software development, so I decided to run with it. However, if some of my readers can provide me with better references, I'd be delighted.

Or perhaps I'm just suffering from confirmation bias...

Comments

In RESTful services, media types (e.g. application/xml, application/json) are an important part of Content Negotiation (conneg in the jargon). This enables an API to provide multiple representations of the same resource.

Apart from the standard media types such as application/xml, application/json, etc. an API can (and often should, IMO) expose its resources using specialized media types. These often take the form of vendor-specific media types, such as application/vnd.247e.catalog+xml or application/vnd.247e.album+json.

In this article I'll present some initial findings I've made while investigating this in the ASP.NET Web API (beta).

For an introduction to conneg with the Web API, see Gunnar Peipman's ASP.NET blog, particularly these two posts:

• ASP.NET Web API: How content negotiation works?
• ASP.NET Web API: Extending content negotiation with new formats

The Problem #

In a particular RESTful API, I'd like to enable vendor-specific media types as well as the standard application/xml and application/json media types.

More specifically, I'd like to add these media types to the API:

• application/vnd.247e.album+xml
• application/vnd.247e.artist+xml
• application/vnd.247e.catalog+xml
• application/vnd.247e.search-result+xml
• application/vnd.247e.track+xml
• application/vnd.247e.album+json
• application/vnd.247e.artist+json
• application/vnd.247e.catalog+json
• application/vnd.247e.search-result+json
• application/vnd.247e.track+json

However, I can't just add all these media types to GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.XmlFormatter.SupportedMediaTypes or GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.JsonFormatter.SupportedMediaTypes. If I do that, each and every resource in the API would accept and (claim to) return all of those media types. That's not what I want. Rather, I want specific resources to accept and return specific media types.

For example, if a resource (Controller) returns an instance of the SearchResult (Model) class, it should only accept the media types application/vnd.247e.search-result+xml, application/vnd.247e.search-result+json (as well as the standard application/xml and application/json media types).

Likewise, a resource handling the Album (Model) class should accept and return application/vnd.247e.album+xml and application/vnd.247e.album+json, and so on.

Figuring out how to enable such behavior took me a bit of fiddling (yes, Fiddler was involved).

The Solution #

The Web API uses a polymorphic collection of MediaTypeFormatter classes. These classes can be extended to be more specifically targeted at a specific Model class.

For XML formatting, this can be done by deriving from the built-in XmlMediaTypeFormatter class:

public class TypedXmlMediaTypeFormatter : XmlMediaTypeFormatter
{
    private readonly Type resourceType;
 
    public TypedXmlMediaTypeFormatter(Type resourceType,
        MediaTypeHeaderValue mediaType)
    {
        this.resourceType = resourceType;
 
        this.SupportedMediaTypes.Clear();
        this.SupportedMediaTypes.Add(mediaType);
    }
 
    protected override bool CanReadType(Type type)
    {
        return this.resourceType == type;
    }
 
    protected override bool CanWriteType(Type type)
    {
        return this.resourceType == type;
    }
}

The implementation is quite simple. In the constructor, it makes sure to clear out any existing supported media types and to add only the media type passed in via the constructor.

The CanReadType and CanWriteType overrides only return true of the type parameter matches the type targeted by the particular TypedXmlMediaTypeFormatter instance. You could say that the TypedXmlMediaTypeFormatter provides a specific match between a media type and a resource Model class.

The JSON formatter is similar:

public class TypedJsonMediaTypeFormatter : JsonMediaTypeFormatter
{
    private readonly Type resourceType;
 
    public TypedJsonMediaTypeFormatter(Type resourceType,
        MediaTypeHeaderValue mediaType)
    {
        this.resourceType = resourceType;
 
        this.SupportedMediaTypes.Clear();
        this.SupportedMediaTypes.Add(mediaType);
    }
 
    protected override bool CanReadType(Type type)
    {
        return this.resourceType == type;
    }
 
    protected override bool CanWriteType(Type type)
    {
        return this.resourceType == type;
    }
}

The only difference from the TypedXmlMediaTypeFormatter class is that this one derives from JsonMediaTypeFormatter instead of XmlMediaTypeFormatter.

With these two classes available, I can now register all the custom media types in Global.asax like this:

GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.Add(
    new TypedXmlMediaTypeFormatter(
        typeof(Album),
        new MediaTypeHeaderValue(
            "application/vnd.247e.album+xml")));
GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.Add(
    new TypedXmlMediaTypeFormatter(
        typeof(Artist),
        new MediaTypeHeaderValue(
            "application/vnd.247e.artist+xml")));
GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.Add(
    new TypedXmlMediaTypeFormatter(
        typeof(Catalog),
        new MediaTypeHeaderValue(
            "application/vnd.247e.catalog+xml")));
GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.Add(
    new TypedXmlMediaTypeFormatter(
        typeof(SearchResult),
        new MediaTypeHeaderValue(
            "application/vnd.247e.search-result+xml")));
GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.Add(
    new TypedXmlMediaTypeFormatter(
        typeof(Track),
        new MediaTypeHeaderValue(
            "application/vnd.247e.track+xml")));
 
GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.Add(
    new TypedJsonMediaTypeFormatter(
        typeof(Album),
        new MediaTypeHeaderValue(
            "application/vnd.247e.album+json")));
GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.Add(
    new TypedJsonMediaTypeFormatter(
        typeof(Artist),
        new MediaTypeHeaderValue(
            "application/vnd.247e.artist+json")));
GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.Add(
    new TypedJsonMediaTypeFormatter(
        typeof(Catalog),
        new MediaTypeHeaderValue(
            "application/vnd.247e.catalog+json")));
GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.Add(
    new TypedJsonMediaTypeFormatter(
        typeof(SearchResult),
        new MediaTypeHeaderValue(
            "application/vnd.247e.search-result+json")));
GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.Add(
    new TypedJsonMediaTypeFormatter(
        typeof(Track),
        new MediaTypeHeaderValue(
            "application/vnd.247e.track+json")));

This is rather repetitive code, but I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to write a set of conventions that appropriately register the correct media type for a Model class.

Caveats #

Please be aware that I've only tested this with a read-only API. You may need to tweak this solution in order to also handle incoming data.

As far as I can tell from the Web API source repository, it seems as though there are some breaking changes in the pipeline in this area, so don't bet the farm on this particular solution.

Lastly, it seems as though this solution doesn't correctly respect opt-out quality parameters in incoming Accept headers. As an example, if I request a 'Catalog' resource, but supply the following Accept header, I'd expect the response to be 406 (Not Acceptable).

Accept: application/vnd.247e.search-result+xml; q=1, */*; q=0.0

However, the result is that the service falls back to its default representation, which is application/json. Whether this is a problem with my approach or a bug in the Web API, I haven't investigated.

Comments

In a previous post I demonstrated how to wire up HttpControllerContext with Poor Man's DI. In this article I'll show how to wire up HttpControllerContext with Castle Windsor.

This turns out to be remarkably difficult, at least with the constraints I tend to set for myself:

• Readers of this blog may have an inkling that I have an absolute abhorrence of static state, so anything relying on that is out of the question.
• In addition to that, I also prefer to leverage the container as much as possible, so I'm not keen on duplicating a responsibility that really belongs to the container.
• No injecting the container into itself. That's just unnatural and lewd (without being fun).
• If possible, the solution should be thread-safe.
• The overall solution should still adhere to the Register Resolve Release pattern, so registering a captured HttpControllerContext is a no-go. It's also unlikely to work, since you'd need to somehow scope each registered instance to its source request.
• That also rules out nested containers.

OK, so given these constraints, how can an object graph like this one be created, only with Castle Windsor instead of Poor Man's DI?

return new CatalogController(
    new RouteLinker(
        baseUri,
        controllerContext));

Somehow, the HttpControllerContext instance must be captured and made available for further resolution of a CatalogController instance.

Capturing the HttpControllerContext #

The first step is to capture the HttpControllerContext instance, as early as possible. From my previous post it should be reasonably clear that the best place to capture this instance is from within IHttpControllerActivator.Create.

Here's the requirement: the HttpControllerContext instance must be captured and made available for further resolution of the object graph - preferably in a thread-safe manner. Ideally, it should be captured in a thread-safe object that can start out uninitialized, but then allow exactly one assignment of a value.

At the time I first struggled with this, I was just finishing The Joy of Clojure, so this sounded to me an awful lot like the description of a promise. Crowdsourcing on Twitter turned up that the .NET equivalent of a promise is TaskCompletionSource<T>.

Creating a custom IHttpControllerActivator with an injected TaskCompletionSource<HttpControllerContext> sounds like a good approach. If the custom IHttpControllerActivator can be scoped to a specific request, that would be the solution then and there.

However, as I've previously described, the current incarnation of the ASP.NET Web API has the unfortunate behavior that all framework Services (such as IHttpControllerActivator) are resolved once and cached forever (effectively turning them into having the Singleton lifestyle, despite what you may attempt to configure in your container).

With Dependency Injection, the common solution to bridge the gap between a long-lasting lifestyle and a shorter lifestyle is a factory.

Thus, instead of injecting TaskCompletionSource<HttpControllerContext> into a custom IHttpControllerActivator, a Func<TaskCompletionSource<HttpControllerContext>> can be injected to bridge the lifestyle gap.

One other thing: the custom IHttpControllerActivator is only required to capture the HttpControllerContext for further reference, so I don't want to reimplement all the functionality of DefaultHttpControllerActivator. This is the reason why the custom IHttpControllerActivator ends up being a Decorator:

public class ContextCapturingControllerActivator :
    IHttpControllerActivator
{
    private readonly IHttpControllerActivator activator;
    private readonly Func<TaskCompletionSource<HttpControllerContext>>
        promiseFactory;
 
    public ContextCapturingControllerActivator(
        Func<TaskCompletionSource<HttpControllerContext>> promiseFactory,
        IHttpControllerActivator activator)
    {
        this.activator = activator;
        this.promiseFactory = promiseFactory;
    }
 
    public IHttpController Create(
        HttpControllerContext controllerContext,
        Type controllerType)
    {
        this.promiseFactory().SetResult(controllerContext);
        return this.activator.Create(controllerContext, controllerType);
    }
}

The ContextCapturingControllerActivator class simply Decorates another IHttpControllerActivator and does one thing before delegating the call to the inner implementation: it uses the factory to create a new instance of TaskCompletionSource<HttpControllerContext> and assigns the HttpControllerContext instance to that promise.

Scoping #

Because the Web API is basically being an ass (I can write this here, because I'm gambling that the solitary reader making it this far is so desperate that he or she is not going to care about the swearing) by treating framework Services as Singletons, it doesn't matter how it's being registered:

container.Register(Component
    .For<IHttpControllerActivator>()
    .ImplementedBy<ContextCapturingControllerActivator>());
container.Register(Component
    .For<IHttpControllerActivator>()
    .ImplementedBy<DefaultHttpControllerActivator>());

Notice that because Castle Windsor is being such an awesome library that it implicitly understands the Decorator pattern, I can simple register both Decorator and Decoratee in an ordered sequence.

The factory itself must also be registered as a Singleton (the default in Castle Windsor):

container.Register(Component
    .For<Func<TaskCompletionSource<HttpControllerContext>>>()
    .AsFactory());

Here, I'm taking advantage of Castle Windsor's Typed Factory Facility, so I'm simply asking it to treat a Func<TaskCompletionSource<HttpControllerContext>> as an Abstract Factory. Doing that means that every time the delegate is being invoked, Castle Windsor will create an instance of TaskCompletionSource<HttpControllerContext> with the correct lifetime.

This provides the bridge from Singleton lifestyle to PerWebRequest:

container.Register(Component
    .For<TaskCompletionSource<HttpControllerContext>>()
    .LifestylePerWebRequest());

Notice that TaskCompletionSource<HttpControllerContext> is registered with a PerWebRequest lifestyle, which means that every time the above delegate is invoked, it's going to create an instance which is scoped to the current request. This is exactly the desired behavior.

Registering HttpControllerContext #

The only thing left is registering the HttpControllerContext class itself:

container.Register(Component
    .For<HttpControllerContext>()
    .UsingFactoryMethod(k => 
        k.Resolve<TaskCompletionSource<HttpControllerContext>>()
            .Task.Result)
    .LifestylePerWebRequest());

This defines that HttpControllerContext instances are going to be resolved the following way: each time an HttpControllerContext instance is requested, the container is going to look up a TaskCompletionSource<HttpControllerContext> and return the result from that task.

The TaskCompletionSource<HttpControllerContext> instance is scoped per web request and previously captured (as you may recall) by the ContextCapturingControllerActivator class.

That's all (sic!) there's to it :)

Comments

The ASP.NET Web API (beta) defines a class called HttpControllerContext. As the name implies, it provides a context for a Controller. This article describes how to inject an instance of this class into a Service.

The Problem #

A Service may need an instance of the HttpControllerContext class. For an example, see the RouteLinker class in my previous post. A Controller, on the other hand, may depend on such a Service:

public CatalogController(IResourceLinker resourceLinker)

How can a CatalogController instance be wired up with an instance of RouteLinker, which again requires an instance of HttpControllerContext? In contrast to the existing ASP.NET MVC API, there's no easy way to read the current context. There's no HttpControllerContext.Current method or any other easy way (that I have found) to refer to an HttpControllerContext as part of the Composition Root.

True: it's easily available as a property on a Controller, but at the time of composition, there's no Controller instance (yet). A Controller instance is exactly what the Composition Root is attempting to create. This sounds like a circular reference problem. Fortunately, it's not.

The Solution #

For Poor Man's DI, the solution is relatively simple. As I've previously described, by default the responsibility of creating Controller instances is handled by an instance of IHttpControllerActivator. This is, essentially, the Composition Root (at least for all Controllers).

The Create method of that interface takes exactly the HttpControllerContext required by RouteLinker - or, put differently: the framework will supply an instance every time it invokes the Create method. Thus, a custom IHttpControllerActivator solves the problem:

public class PoorMansCompositionRoot : IHttpControllerActivator
{
    public IHttpController Create(
        HttpControllerContext controllerContext,
        Type controllerType)
    {
        if (controllerType == typeof(CatalogController))
        {
            var url = HttpContext.Current.Request.Url;
            var baseUri =
                new UriBuilder(
                    url.Scheme,
                    url.Host,
                    url.Port).Uri;
 
            return new CatalogController(
                new RouteLinker(
                    baseUri,
                    controllerContext));
        }
 
        // Handle other types here...
    }
}

The controllerContext parameter is simply passed on to the RouteLinker constructor.

The only thing left is to register the PoorMansCompositionRoot with the ASP.NET Web API. This can be done in Global.asax by using the GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.ServiceResolver.SetResolver method, as described in my previous post. Just resolve IHttpControllerActivator to an instance of PoorMansCompositionRoot.

Comments