partial-records: Template haskell utilities for constructing records with default values

[ bsd3, data, library ] [ Propose Tags ]

If you have a datatype with a lot of default-able fields, e.g.

data Foo =
  { fld1 :: Maybe Int
  , fld2 :: Maybe Char
  , fld3 :: Word
  }

and you want to avoid the the boilerplate of writing all the default values every time you construct a record of this type, you could write a "default value" of this type:

defaultFoo :: Foo
defaultFoo = Foo { fld1 = Nothing, fld2 = Nothing, fld3 = 0 }

You could then use record modification syntax to make necessary changes to this value. But perhaps you can't / don't want to provide default values for all of the fields, but only some of them? You could implement a "default smart constructor" that would take the non-optional arguments and then fill in the optional ones like so:

defaultFoo :: Word -> Foo
defaultFoo x = Foo { fld1 = Nothing, fld2 = Nothing, fld3 = x }

But then you lose the benefit of record syntax: you can't name the fields you're providing values for.

This package reconciles the two problems: with only a little bit of Template Haskell it provides a way to construct a record with optional fields while also letting you refer to the names of those fields. You make two splices:

mkToPartial ''Foo
  -- defines 'mkfld1', 'mkfld2', 'mkfld3'
mkFromPartial "mkFoo" [t|Foo|] [|Foo { fld1 = Nothing, fld2 = Nothing }
  |]
  -- defines 'mkFoo'

And then you can use them like so:

val :: Foo
val = mkFoo
  $ mkfld3 123
  ? mkfld1 (Just 456)
-- val = Foo { fld1 = Just 456, fld2 = Nothing, fld3 = 123 }

The Template Haskell splice lets you define default values for a subset of the fields, and those defaults will be used when you call mkFoo. You can list fields in any order, but if you omit a mandatory field (one that doesn't have a default), that would be a type error at compile time.

You can make multiple Data.Partial.TH.mkFromPartial splices, this is occasionally useful for parameterized types, for example:

data Bar a =
  { bar1 :: Maybe Int
  , bar2 :: a
  }
mkToPartial ''Bar
mkFromPartial "mkBar" [t|forall a. Bar a|]
  [|Bar { bar1 = Nothing }
  |]
  -- mkBar :: ... -> Bar a, and bar2 is a required field
mkFromPartial "mkBarMaybe" [t|forall a. Bar (Maybe a)|]
  [|Bar { bar1 = Nothing, bar2 = Nothing }
  |]
  -- mkBarMaybe :: ... -> Bar (Maybe a), and bar2 is an optional field

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Versions [RSS] 0.1.0.0, 0.2.0.0, 0.2.1.0, 0.2.2.0, 0.2.2.1
Dependencies base (>=4.9 && <=4.13), template-haskell (>=2.11), transformers (>=0.5) [details]
License BSD-3-Clause
Copyright (C) mniip 2019
Author mniip
Maintainer mniip@mniip.com
Category Data
Home page https://github.com/mniip/partial-records
Uploaded by mniip at 2019-10-22T17:46:32Z
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Downloads 1729 total (12 in the last 30 days)
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Status Docs available [build log]
Last success reported on 2019-10-22 [all 1 reports]