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Ohm ॐ

Object-hash mapping library for Redis.

Description

Ohm is a library for storing objects in Redis, a persistent key-value database. It includes an extensible list of validations and has very good performance.

Community

Join the mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/ohm-ruby

Meet us on IRC: #ohm on freenode.net

Getting started

Install Redis. On most platforms it’s as easy as grabbing the sources, running make and then putting the redis-server binary in the PATH.

Once you have it installed, you can execute redis-server and it will run on localhost:6379 by default. Check the redis.conf file that comes with the sources if you want to change some settings.

If you don’t have Ohm, try this:

$ sudo gem install ohm

Or you can grab the code from http://github.com/soveran/ohm.

Now, in an irb session you can test the Redis adapter directly:

>> require "ohm"
=> true
>> Ohm.connect
=> []
>> Ohm.redis.set "Foo", "Bar"
=> "OK"
>> Ohm.redis.get "Foo"
=> "Bar"

Models

Ohm’s purpose in life is to map objects to a key value datastore. It doesn’t need migrations or external schema definitions. Take a look at the example below:

Example

class Event < Ohm::Model
  attribute :name
  set :participants
  list :comments
  counter :votes

  index :name

  def validate
    assert_present :name
  end
end

All models have the id attribute built in, you don’t need to declare it.

This is how you interact with ids:

event = Event.create :name => "Ohm Worldwide Conference 2031"
event.id
# => 1

# Find an event by id
event == Event[1]
# => true

# Trying to find a non existent event
Event[2]
# => nil

This example shows some basic features, like attribute declarations and validations. Keep reading to find out what you can do with models.

Attribute types

Ohm::Model provides four attribute types: attribute, set, list and counter.

attribute

An attribute is just any value that can be stored as a string. In the example above, we used this field to store the Event’s name. You can use it to store numbers, but be aware that Redis will return a string when you retrieve the value.

set

A set in Redis is an unordered list, with an external behavior similar to that of Ruby arrays, but optimized for faster membership lookups. It’s used internally by Ohm to keep track of the instances of each model and for generating and maintaining indexes.

list

A list is like an array in Ruby. It’s perfectly suited for queues and for keeping elements in order.

counter

A counter is like a regular attribute, but the direct manipulation of the value is not allowed. You can retrieve, increase or decrease the value, but you can not assign it. In the example above, we used a counter attribute for tracking votes. As the incr and decr operations are atomic, you can rest assured a vote won’t be counted twice.

Persistence strategy

The attributes declared with attribute are only persisted after calling save. If the object is in an invalid state, no value is sent to Redis (see the section on Validations below).

Operations on attributes of type list, set and counter are possible only after the object is created (when it has an assigned id). Any operation on these kinds of attributes is performed immediately, without running the object validations. This design yields better performance than running the validations on each operation or buffering the operations and waiting for a call to save.

For most use cases, this pattern doesn’t represent a problem. If you need to check for validity before operating on lists, sets or counters, you can use this pattern:

if event.valid?
  event.comments << "Great event!"
end

If you are saving the object, this will suffice:

if event.save
  event.comments << "Wonderful event!"
end

Associations

Ohm lets you use collections (lists and sets) to represent associations. For this, you only need to provide a second parameter when declaring a list or a set:

set :attendees, Person

After this, every time you refer to event.attendees you will be talking about instances of the model Person. If you want to get the raw values of the set, you can use event.attendees.raw.

The attendees collection also exposes two sorting methods: sort returns the elements ordered by id, and sort_by receives a parameter with an attribute name, which will determine the sorting order. Both methods receive an options hash which is explained in the documentation for Ohm::Attributes::Collection#sort.

Adding instances of Person to the attendees hash is done with the add method:

@event.attendees.add(Person.create(name: "Albert"))

# And now...
@event.attendees.each do |person|
  # ...do what you want with this person.
end

Just to clarify: when you add items to a set with <<, Ohm inserts whatever you send without checking it. When you use add, it assumes it’s an instance of some Ohm::Model and stores its id.

Indexes

An index is a set that’s handled automatically by Ohm. For any index declared, Ohm maintains different sets of objects ids for quick lookups.

For example, in the example above, the index on the name attribute will allow for searches like Event.find(name: “some value”).

Note that the assert_unique validation and the methods find and except need a corresponding index in order to work.

Finding

You can find a collection of records with the find method:

# This returns a collection of users with the username "Albert"
User.find(username: "Albert")

Filtering results

# Find all users from Argentina
User.find(country: "Argentina")

# Find all activated users from Argentina
User.find(country: "Argentina", status: "activated")

# Find all users from Argentina, except those with a suspended account.
User.find(country: "Argentina").except(status: "suspended")

Note that calling these methods results in new sets being created on the fly. This is important so that you can perform further operations before reading the items to the client.

For more information, see SINTERSTORE and SDIFFSTORE.

Validations

Before every save, the validate method is called by Ohm. In the method definition you can use assertions that will determine if the attributes are valid. Nesting assertions is a good practice, and you are also encouraged to create your own assertions. You can trigger validations at any point by calling valid? on a model instance.

Assertions

Ohm ships with some basic assertions. Check Ohm::Validations to see the method definitions.

assert

The assert method is used by all the other assertions. It pushes the second parameter to the list of errors if the first parameter evaluates to false.

def assert(value, error)
  value or errors.push(error) && false
end

assert_present

Checks that the given field is not nil or empty. The error code for this assertion is :not_present.

assert_present :name

assert_format

Checks that the given field matches the provided format. The error code for this assertion is :format.

assert_format :username, /^\w+$/

assert_numeric

Checks that the given field holds a number as a Fixnum or as a string representation. The error code for this assertion is :not_numeric.

assert_numeric :votes

assert_unique

Validates that the attribute or array of attributes are unique. For this, an index of the same kind must exist. The error code is :not_unique.

assert_unique :email

Errors

When an assertion fails, the error report is added to the errors array. Each error report contains two elements: the field where the assertion was issued and the error code.

Validation example

Given the following example:

def validate
  assert_present :foo
  assert_numeric :bar
  assert_format :baz, /^\d{2}$/
  assert_unique :qux
end

If all the assertions fail, the following errors will be present:

obj.errors
# => [[:foo, :not_present], [:bar, :not_numeric], [:baz, :format], [:qux, :not_unique]]

Presenting errors

Unlike other ORMs, that define the full error messages in the model itself, Ohm encourages you to define the error messages outside. If you are using Ohm in the context of a web framework, the views are the proper place to write the error messages.

Ohm provides a presenter that helps you in this quest. The basic usage is as follows:

error_messages = @model.errors.present do |e|
  e.on [:name, :not_present], "Name must be present"
  e.on [:account, :not_present], "You must supply an account"
end

error_messages
# => ["Name must be present", "You must supply an account"]

Having the error message definitions in the views means you can use any sort of helpers. You can also use blocks instead of strings for the values. The result of the block is used as the error message:

error_messages = @model.errors.present do |e|
  e.on [:email, :not_unique] do
    "The email #{@model.email} is already registered."
  end
end

error_messages
# => ["The email foo@example.com is already registered."]