structural's Introduction

Structural

Structural is a cut down fork of Id, designed to work with Ruby >= 1.8.7 and Rails >= 2.3.

Defining a model

class MyModel
  include Structural::Model

  field :foo
  field :bar, default: 42
  field :baz, key: 'barry'
end

my_model = MyModel.new(foo: 7, barry: 'hello')
my_model.foo # => 7
my_model.bar # => 42
my_model.baz # => 'hello'

Default values can be specified, as well as key aliases.

Associations

We can also specify has_one or has_many associations for nested documents:

class Zoo
  include Structural::Model

  has_many :lions
  has_many :zebras
  has_one :zookeeper, type: Person
end

zoo = Zoo.new(lions: [{name: 'Hetty'}],
              zebras: [{name: 'Lisa'}],
              zookeeper: {name: 'Russell'})

zoo.lions.first.class # => Lion
zoo.lions.first.name  # => "Hetty"
zoo.zookeeper.class   # => Person
zoo.zookeeper.name    # => "Russell"

Types are inferred from the association name unless one is specified.

Designed for immutability

structural models provide accessor methods, but no mutator methods. When changing the value of a field, a new copy of the object is created:

person = Person.new(name: 'Russell', job: 'programmer')
person.set(name: 'Radek')
# => returns a new Person whose name is Radek and whose job is 'programmer'
person.hat.set(colour: 'red')
# => returns a new person object with a new hat object with its colour set to red

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