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                        Erlang Object Notation

Manual

Overview

In an Erlang system, a dictionary-style datastructure should be used to pass data between subsystems. This library supports that observation in two ways.

Unified API

The eon module exports a clean API for working with dictionaries (internally referred to as "objects").

• Basics: new, get, set, del;
• Higher order: map, filter, fold;
• Sets: union, intersection, difference;
• Iterators: make, next, done.

Most functions take the object as the first argument (mnemonic: set(Obj, K, V) --> Obj[K] = V).

All API functions support both common implementations of the dictionary interface in Erlang (lists of two-tuples aka proplists and dicts) as inputs and promote their outputs to dicts.

EON also supports a third representation, lists with an even number of elements where the odd elements are interpreted as keys and the even elements are interpreted as values. We call these "literals". Example:

The following terms are equivalent as far as EON is concerned:

dict:store(k2, v2, dict:store(k1, v1, dict:new()))

[ {k1, v1}
, {k2, v2}
]

[ k1, v1
, k2, v2
]

Comprehensive input validation and conversion

Basics

The `eon_type1 module supports checking EON objects (dicts) against a type declaration.

The API is eon_type:check_obj(Obj, Decl) where both Obj and Decl are EON objects (proplists or dicts). Obj and Decl must have the same keys. Obj maps those keys to arbitrary terms whereas Decl maps them to types. A type is simply an atom, the name of a module implementing one of the eon_type_ behaviours.

There are two eon_type_ behaviours:

1). eon_type_prim

Requires implementations of 5 callback functions:

• name/0 returns the name of the type (for error reporting).
• parameters/0 returns the parameters needed by the type (see below).
• normalize/2 takes the term being checked and the current parameters and returns the term, possibly after applying normalization of some sort to it. This callback is usually the identity function (but can come in handy when checking external data, which is often encoded as strings).
• validate/2 takes the term being checked and the current parameters and returns true iff the term is a member of this type (crash or return false otherwise). This is the central validation callback.
• convert/2 takes the term being checked and the current parameters and returns the term, possibly after transforming it to an internal representation. This is the central conversion callback.

2). eon_type_rec

Requires implementations of 3 callback functions.

• name/0 as above.
• parameters/0 as above.
• decl/2 takes the term being checked and the current parameters and returns a decl object (a specification of what the term, which implicitly must be an EON object, should look like, see above). This is the central recursion callback.

Parameters

All EON types take parameters. These are arbitrary key/value mappings which provide external context to the various callbacks (for instance, the validate/2 callback for a phone number may need to know which country the phone number is supposed to be legal for).

The parameters/0 callbacks return a list of parameter names:

parameters() -> [].              %no params
parameters() -> [foo, bar]       %two params, foo and bar
parameters() -> [foo, {bar, 42}] %two params, foo and bar
                                 %bar defaults to 42

Parameters are represented as EON objects, so the callback functions' second argument will be a dict mapping all the names in the list returned by the type's parameters/0 callback to terms.

There are three kinds of parameters values.

• Explicit parameter values are passed in the decl object: instead of just mapping a key to a type (atom) the decl object may map it to a tuple, {Type, Args}, where Args is an object which provides mappings for a subset of Type's parameters.
• Implicit parameter values are extracted from the decl object a type occurs in. If there's a key which matches the name of a parameter and no explicit value has been provided for this parameter, the value associated with this key after type checking (and conversion!) will be passed as the value of the parameter.
• Default parameter values are provided in the paramters callback (see example above).

Under-parameterized types are untypable.

Operation

The EON type checker takes the input object and the decl object and returns the converted (original values are replaced by the output of the primitive types' convert/2 callbacks) version of the input object if and only if all fields can be validated (the primitive types' validate/2 callbacks return true).

It does this by computing the fixpoint of the input object under the parameter-constraints imposed by the decl object. Progress occurs when either

• a new field can be validated because we have all parameters for its type, or
• we find a new implicit parameter (which must have been validated already).

This probably sounds more complicated than it is. Have a look at eon_type.erl!

DOCUMENTME

alias types
list types
sum types
check_term
&c.

Manifest

eon.erl            -- dict API
eon.hrl            -- shared typedefs
eon_type.erl       -- type checker
eon_type_alias.erl -- behaviour for alias types
eon_type_list.erl  -- behaviour for list types
eon_type_prim.erl  -- behaviour for primitive types
eon_type_rec.erl   -- behaviour for recursive types