Notes from Two Weeks of Haskell

2017-10-21 by Quinlan Pfiffersoftwarewriting

I’ve been writing Haskell at $WORK for about two weeks now, and it’s been pretty fun. I’ve also learned quite a bit. This is just a place to store some common idioms/things I’ve learned, and mostly to have a place where I can put some simple, explicit code samples.

PostgreSQL.Simple

PostgreSQL.Simple is a great package started by Bryan O’Sullivan, the guy that primarily wrote Real World Haskell. He also wrote the Aeson library. They have similarities, and it’s pretty obvious.

This section is mostly because I keep forgetting (ie. haven’t practiced enough) how to put things into queries, get things out of the database, serialize them to records, that sort of thing.

Updating a Record

Use execute for things that will modify database structures, like UPDATE or INSERT. You’ll notice that here we don’t have to specify the types on (name, lat, lng, session_id) because they exist in the function declaration and GHC can infer them.

update_location_query = "UPDATE location AS loc \
    \SET name = ?, lat = ?, lng = ? \
    \FROM session AS sesh \
    \WHERE sesh.location_id = loc.id AND \
    \      sesh.id = ?;"

updateLocation :: T.Text -> T.Text -> Double -> Double -> ReaderT Connection IO Int64
updateLocation session_id name lat lng = do
    conn <- ask
    lift $ execute conn update_location_query (name, lat, lng, session_id)

Selecting a Bunch of Records

We use query_ here because query_ doesn’t expect any arguments to interpolate into the SQL query.

class_query = "SELECT id, name \
    \FROM class \
    \ORDER BY name;"

getClasses :: Connection -> IO [Class]
getClasses conn = query_ conn class_query

Selecting Just One Record

This will return a list of one item, but Haskell doesn’t know that so it comes back as a list. It works well enough. This also interpolates the class ID into the query.

session_query = "SELECT id, timestamp \
    \FROM session \
    \WHERE cls_id = ? \
    \ORDER BY timestamp DESC \
    \LIMIT 1;"

getSessionsOfClass :: Connection -> Class -> IO [Session]
getSessionsOfClass conn cls =
    query conn session_query class_id
  where class_id = (Only $ classId cls) :: Only UUID

ReaderT

ReaderT is really useful, and a great introduction (for me) on how to use a monad transformer stack. I puzzled out a trivial example of using it with PostgreSQL.Simple to pass database connections around.

These code samples are what I’m actually using. Here a Connection record is embedded inside the ReaderT context so we can use it later on, without explicitly passing around a Connection object. This doesn’t have much benefit now, but later on if we need to add extra functionality it will be trivial to rewrite the sections of code using the ReaderT, rather than explicitly redefining each and every type signature of each function that uses the Connection.

main :: IO ()
main = do
    conn <- connectToDev
    args <- getArgs
    case parseArgs args of
        Just (session_id, address) ->
            flip runReaderT conn $ do
                 startGeocode (T.pack session_id) (T.pack address)
        ...

and an example of unwrapping the context of the ReaderT:

updateLocation :: T.Text -> T.Text -> Double -> Double -> ReaderT Connection IO Int64
updateLocation session_id name lat lng = do
    conn <- ask
    lift $ execute conn update_location_query (name, lat, lng, session_id)

Here you can see that we’re getting the Connection out of the ReaderT by asking for it. Neat! Also of note here, is that you have to lift the result of the execute call back into the monad transformer stack. Fun fact here: Because our transformer stack is only one level deep, you can use lift and liftIO interchangably.