Tech behind Tech

In this part we will start implementing edit and delete functionalities.

We are going to build these services,

Edit address – PUT – http://localhost:8080/addresses/:id
Delete address – DELETE – http://localhost:8080/addresses/:id

1) Adding PUT and DELETE route

Edit routes.clj

(ns address_book.routes
  (:use [compojure.core])
  (:require [address-book.address :as address]
            [address-book.middleware :as mdw]
            [compojure.route :as route]
            [clj-json.core :as json]))

(defn json-response [data & [status]]
  {:status (or status 200)
   :headers {"Content-Type" "application/json"}
   :body (json/generate-string data)})

(defroutes handler
  (GET "/addresses" [] (json-response (address/find-all)))
  (GET "/addresses/:id" [id] (json-response (address/find id)))
  (POST "/addresses" {params :params}  (json-response (address/create params)))
  (PUT "/addresses/:id" {params :params} (json-response (address/update (params "id")  params)))
  (DELETE "/addresses/:id" [id] (json-response (address/delete id )))

  (route/files "/" {:root "public"})
  (route/not-found "Page not found"))

(def address-book
     (-> handler
         mdw/wrap-request-logging))

As you can see it is pretty straight forward to add PUT and DELETE route.

What is up with params?

In previous version of Compojure there were some magic variables, like params, session etc. From version 0.4 there are no more magic variables. Instead Compojure provides a map “params”. “params” map will contain all request information. For some reason, params map have a key :params which contains request parameters. That is why we have do {params :params}. I wish they will rename “params” to something else.

Instead of doing {params :params}, the compojure document states that we could do [params id] and when compojure detects a vector, instead of a map it will assign the parameters to each value of the vector. But for some reason, I was not able to make it work.

Front End code

Checkout from github for front end code. Warning: front end code is bad, do not take this as an example.

In next part we will see how to send flash messages.

Source code is now available at github. Created branches for each part.

Next part is posted.

In this part lets write our own middleware.

From part4 you will remember,

“Middleware are functions that could be chained together to process a request. Middleware functions can take any number of arguments, but the spec stats that first argument should be a handler and function should return a handler. An example for middleware is logging all requests that comes to your webserver.”

1) Create a namespace for middleware

Create src/address_book/middleware.clj

(ns address-book.middleware)

(defn- log [msg & vals]
  (let [line (apply format msg vals)]
    (locking System/out (println line))))

(defn wrap-request-logging [handler]
  (fn [{:keys [request-method uri] :as req}]
    (let [resp (handler req)]
      (log "Processing %s %s" request-method uri)
      resp)))

Our wrap-request-logging is a middleware which takes a handler and returns an handler.

2) Add our middleware to our chain of handlers

Edit routes.clj

(ns address_book.routes
  (:use [compojure.core])
  (:require [address-book.address :as address]
            [address-book.middleware :as mdw]
            [compojure.route :as route]
            [clj-json.core :as json]))

(defn json-response [data & [status]]
  {:status (or status 200)
   :headers {"Content-Type" "application/json"}
   :body (json/generate-string data)})

(defroutes handler
  (GET "/addresses" [] (json-response (address/find-all)))
  (GET "/addresses/:id" [id] (json-response (address/find id)))
  (POST "/addresses" {params :params}  (json-response (address/create params)))

  (route/files "/" {:root "public"})
  (route/not-found "Page not found"))

(def address-book
     (-> handler
         mdw/wrap-request-logging))

3) Test our middleware

Now start your server and you can see all requests are getting logged. This is very powerful feature. We can do security etc using middleware. Ring and Compojure comes with some useful middleware. Check them out.

In next part we will implement edit  and delete functionalities.

Source code is now available at github. Created branches for each part.

In this part we will start implementing Add,  View and View all functionalities.

The services we are going to build are

View All Addresses – GET – http://localhost:8080/addresses
View single address – GET – http://localhost:8080/addresses/:id
Add Address – POST – http://localhost:8080/addresses

Interactive Development using slime

I mentioned in last part that after every change to our code we need to restart our server for our changes to be reflected. This is a pain and against clojure (lisp) philosophy . It would be great if we could eval our modified buffers in emacs and those changes reflected immediately in our jetty server. Thankfully there is very easy way to do this.

In core.clj we are starting jetty adapter. We can start this jetty server in background using future and reload the namespace that we changed. This way we can do interactive development without restarting our server.

PS: Make sure you have emacs setup with slime. I feel emacs is the best IDE for clojure. Again this is my opinion. There are lot of information on how to do this.

I talked about jetty adapter. It is time for us to look at some what little deeper in Compojure.

Compojure

Compojure is based on a library  called Ring. In fact most of clojure web frameworks are based on Ring. So to understand Compojure, it is important to understand Ring.

Ring has three components.

1) Handlers:

Handlers are main functions that  process a request. We define handlers using defroutes macro.

2) Middleware:

Middleware are functions that could be chained together to process a request. Middleware functions can take any number of arguments, but the spec stats that first argument should be an handler and function should return an handler. An example for middleware is logging all requests that comes to your webserver.  Ring and compojure comes with some standard middleware. We will see in next part how to create our own middleware.

3) Adapters:

Adapters are functions could adapt our handler to a web server. We are using jetty adapter to tie our handler to jetty server.

Refactor code to make it easy for interactive development

Edit core.clj

(ns address_book.core
  (:use [compojure.core]
        [ring.adapter.jetty])
  (:require [compojure.route :as route]))

(defroutes example
  (GET "/" [] "<h1>My Address Book!</h1>")
  (route/files "/" {:root "public"})
  (route/not-found "Page not found"))

(future (run-jetty (var address-book) {:port 8080}))

1) Add swank-clojure to our project

swank-clojure comes with lein plugin which will allow us to start a swank server and from emacs you can connect using slime. There are lot of documentation about swank-clojure and slime. Let me know if you need more information. If I see enough interest, I could blog about it or at least point to some good resources.

Edit project.clj

(defproject address_book "1.0.0-SNAPSHOT"
  :description "Address Book"
  :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.2.0"]
                 [org.clojure/clojure-contrib "1.2.0"]
                 [compojure "0.4.1"]
                 [ring/ring-jetty-adapter "0.2.3"]]
  :dev-dependencies [[swank-clojure "1.2.1"]])

and run

lein deps

Now you should be able to start swank server using

lein swank

2) Break core.clj into different namespaces

Current core.clj is doing two things. Setting up routes and starting jetty server. Lets break it into web_server.clj and routes.clj

rm src/address_book/core.clj

create src/address_book/routes.clj

(ns address_book.routes
  (:use [compojure.core])
  (:require [compojure.route :as route]))

(defroutes address-book
  (GET "/" [] "<h1>My Address Book!</h1>")
  (route/files "/" {:root "public"})
  (route/not-found "Page not found"))

create src/address_book/webserver.clj

(ns address_book.webserver
  (:use [compojure.core]
        [ring.adapter.jetty]
        [address_book.routes :as routes]))

(future (run-jetty (var address-book) {:port 8080}))

3) At last lets create our Address namespace

In this code, I am going to use atoms for persistence. In future I will probably show how we can persist in mysql db using clj-records.

create src/address_book/address.clj

(ns address-book.address
  (:use [address-book.utils number])
  (:refer-clojure :exclude (find create)))

(def STORE (atom {:1 {:id :1 :name "Siva Jagadeesan" :street1 "88 7th" :street2 "#203" :city "Cupertino" :country "USA" :zipcode 98802}}))

(defn create [attrs]
  (let [id (random-number)
        new-attrs (merge {:id id} attrs)]
    (swap! STORE merge {id new-attrs})
    new-attrs))

(defn find-all []
  (vals @STORE))

(defn find [id]
  ((to-keyword id) @STORE))

(defn update [id attrs]
  (let [updated-attrs (merge (find id) attrs)]
    (swap! STORE assoc id updated-attrs)
    updated-attrs))

(defn delete [id]
  (let [old-attrs (find id)]
    (swap! STORE dissoc id)
    old-attrs))

Create utils/number.clj

(ns address-book.utils.number
  (:import [java.util Date]))

(defn to-keyword [num]
  (if-not (keyword? num)
    (keyword (str num))
    num))

(defn random-number []
  (to-keyword (.getTime (Date.))))

PS: I am not writing tests to keep this blog short. But I would advice everyone to write tests.

4)   Lets update routes for add, view and view all functionalities

</span>
<pre>(ns address_book.routes
  (:use [compojure.core])
  (:require [address-book.address :as address]
            [compojure.route :as route]
            [clj-json.core :as json]))

(defn json-response [data & [status]]
  {:status (or status 200)
   :headers {"Content-Type" "application/json"}
   :body (json/generate-string data)})

(defroutes handler
  (GET "/addresses" [] (json-response (address/find-all)))
  (GET "/addresses/:id" [id] (json-response (address/find id)))
  (POST "/addresses" {params :params}  (json-response (address/create params)))

  (route/files "/" {:root "public"})
  (route/not-found "Page not found"))

(def address-book
     handler)

Compojure comes with GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, HEAD and ANY macro to define routes. These macros are self explanatory. Currently we have used GET and POST to define our routes.

Parsing Parameters

Compojure binds request parameters to params.

To get all parameters from request you can destructure map like we did in

POST "/addresses" {params :params}  (json-response (address/create params)))

To get particular parameters from request you can use Compojure sugar syntax like we did in
[sourceode](GET “/addresses/:id” [id] (json-response (address/find id)))[/sourcecode]

5)  Lets build our front end
PS: front end code is a hack. Please don’t follow these codes as a good practice.

Edit public/index.html

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
        "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html lang="en">
<head>
	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
	<title>My Address Book</title>
        <link href="/css/address.css" media="screen" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
        <script src="/js/jquery-1.4.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
        <script src="/js/jquery-ui-1.8.1.custom.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
        <script src="/js/jquery.form.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
        <script src="/js/address_book.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
        <script src="/js/address_list.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="wrap">
	<div id="header"><h1>My Address Book</h1></div>

	<div id="main">
          <table id="address">
            <tr><td>Name</td><td id="name"/></tr>
            <tr><td>Street1</td><td id="street1"/></tr>
            <tr><td>Street2</td><td id="street2"/></tr>
            <tr><td>City</td><td id="city"/></tr>
            <tr><td>Country</td><td id="country"/></tr>
            <tr><td>ZipCode</td><td id="zipcode"/></tr>
          </table>
	  <table id="address-list" border="1" width="100%" rules="rows" align="center">
            <tr>
              <th>Name</th>
              <th>Action</th>
            </tr>
            <tr>
              <td >row 1, cell 1</td>
              <td align="center">row 1, cell 2</td>
            </tr>
          </table>
	</div>
	<div id="sidebar">
          <form id="address-form" class="formular" method="post" action="/addresses">
	    <fieldset class="login">
	      <legend>New Address</legend>
	      <div>
		<label for="name">Name</label> <input type="text" id="name" name="name">
	      </div>
              <div>
		<label for="street1">Street1</label> <input type="text" id="street1" name="street1">
	      </div>
               <div>
		<label for="street2">Street2</label> <input type="text" id="street2" name="street2">
	      </div>
              <div>
		<label for="city">City</label> <input type="text" id="city" name="city">
	      </div>
              <div>
		<label for="country">Country</label> <input type="text" id="country" name="country">
	      </div>
               <div>
		<label for="zipcode">ZipCode</label> <input type="text" id="zipcode" name="zipcode">
	      </div>

              <input class="submit" type="submit" value="Create"/>
	    </fieldset>
          </form>
	</div>
	<div id="footer">
	  <p><a href="TechbehindTech.com">TechBehindTech</a> -- Siva Jagadeesan</p>
	</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Create public/css/address.css

body,html {
    margin:0;
    padding:0;
    color:#000;
    background:#a7a09a;
}
#wrap {
    width:970px;
    margin:0 auto;
    background: #fffeff;
}
#header {
    padding:5px 10px;
    background: #054477;
	text-align: right;
	color: #fffeff;
}
h1 {
    margin:0;
}
#main {
    float:left;
    width:580px;
    padding:10px;
	background-color: #fffeff;
}
h2 {
    margin:0 0 1em;
	background-color: #fffeff;
}
#sidebar {
    float:right;
    width:350px;
    padding:10px;
    background-color: #fffeff;
}
#footer {
    clear:both;
    padding:5px 10px;
    background: #fed47f;
}
#footer p {
    margin:0;
}
* html #footer {
    height:1px;
}

form * {margin:0;padding:0;} /* Standard margin and padding reset, normally done on the body */

legend {
	color:#000; /* IE styles legends with blue text by default */
	*margin-left:-7px;
	font-weight: bold;
	font-size: 20px;
}
fieldset {
	border:1px solid #dedede; /* Default fieldset borders vary cross browser, so make them the same */
}
fieldset div {
	overflow:hidden; /* Contain the floating elements */
	display:inline-block;
	padding: 10px;
}
fieldset div {display:block;} /* Reset element back to block leaving layout in ie */
label {
	float:left; /* Take out of flow so the input starts at the same height */
	width:8em; /* Set a width so the inputs line up */
}

Create public/js/address_book.js

$(document).ready(function() {
    $("#address").hide();
    $("#address-list").showAddressList();

    $(".address-link").live("click",function(e){
        $.getJSON($(this).attr("href"), function(json) {
            $("#address").showAddress(json);
        });
        e.preventDefault();
    });

    $('#address-form').submit(function(event){
        event.preventDefault();
        var $this = $(this);
        var url = $this.attr('action');
        var dataToSend = $this.serialize();
        var callback = function(data){
            $("#address-list").addAddress(data);
        };
        var options = {
            success:   callback,
            url: url,
            type:     "POST",
            dataType: "json",
            clearForm: true
        };
        $(this).ajaxSubmit(options);
    });

});

Create public/js/address_list.js

function action_links(data){
    var link = "<a href=\"\">edit</a> ";
    link += " | <a href=\"\">delete</a>";
    return "edit | delete";
}

$.fn.showAddressList = function(){
    return this.each(function(){
        var that = this;
        $.getJSON("addresses", function(json) {
            $(that).html(" <tr> <th>Name</th> <th>Action</th> </tr>");
            $.each(json,function(i,data) {
                $(that).append("<tr id=\"address-"+ data.id +" \"><td><a class=\"address-link\" href=\"addresses/" + data.id +"\">" + data.name + "</a></td><td align='center'>" + action_links(data) + "</td></tr>");
            });
        });
    });
};

$.fn.addAddress = function(json){
    var data = json;
    var that = this;
    return this.each(function(){
        var that = this;
        $(that).append("<tr id=\"address-"+ data.id +" \"><td><a class=\"address-link\" href=\"addresses/" + data.id +"\">" + data.name + "</a></td><td align='center'>" + action_links(data) + "</td></tr>");
    });
};

$.fn.showAddress = function(json){
    var data = json;
    var that = this;
    return this.each(function(){
        $(that).slideDown('slow');
        $(that).find("#name").html(data.name);
        $(that).find("#street1").html(data.street1);
        $(that).find("#street2").html(data.street2);
        $(that).find("#city").html(data.city);
        $(that).find("#country").html(data.country);
        $(that).find("#zipcode").html(data.zipcode);
    });
};

Download jquery-1.4.2.min.js, jquery-ui-1.8.1.custom.min.js and jquery.form.js to public/js folder.

6)  Start the web server

[/sourcecode]lein repl src/address_book/webserver.clj [/sourceode]

Wow that was lot of stuff. We will look more into writing our own middlewares in next part.

Source code is now available at github. Created branches for each part.

Part 5 is posted.