Official Sequel (and other ORMs) Support Thread

[Aryk]

I'm working on the Sequel adapter for this library. With it, I will do the following:

• Take the library to actually being fully decoupled from ActiveRecord, just like Rails (if you want to use Rails without having ActiveRecord in your top-level namespace, you can). It would be nice to have this also be a characteristic of this library.
• Support Sequel - be able to run all the specs with all the original models but interfacing with Sequel. This can be done by changing the "ORM" environment variable when running specs.

The library seems to be written with the intent for it to be decoupled from the orm used by the user but doesn't go all the way. With this, the orm specific logic will be housed in one place.

Any additional thoughts or opposition to the idea?

Any other Sequel or other ORM users out there who want to use this library? Please like this so I know how many of you are out there...

[Aryk]

FYI , I've made progress on this and currently going through and fixing specs.

If I issue a pull request decoupling this library from ActiveRecord, will the library authors be interested in merging it? I'm not sure who the maintainers are....@lgebhardt?

[Aryk]

cc @senid231 - Not sure who to cc, but I'm half way done getting the specs working. Some refactoring was required. Would be nice to get your guys take. Are you generally open to having the library be decoupled from ActiveRecord?

[senid231]

@lgebhardt adds RecordAccessor layer that should encapsulate interface to different ORMs
take a look at #977
I think you should create something like SequelRecordAccessor. Take a look at ActiveRecordAccessor implementation in JR

[Aryk]

It doesn't encapsulate it fully. There is a ton of ActiveRecord specific methods in your resource.rb file. You'll see when I submit the PR. To actually make it ORM agnostic fully, its quite some work.

Hopefully we can work together and get it merged in. If you guys see my PR and have suggestions on how to reduce changes and still get it orm-agnostic, I'm all ears, but the second you switch default_record_accessor_klass to something else, things break right and left, and not just from within the SequelRecordAccessor class, but from tests that rely on ActiveRecord specific functionality (ie author.posts.create(title: "My first post", body: "Hello World")) right in the test case to the resource.rb class which makes a lot of assumptions.

In any case, I'll fix it and get the test suite fully working with both ORMs, plus fix a few bugs I found a long the way. :)

[mmun]

Hi @Aryk. Have you made any progress on this? Is it publicly accessible?

[Aryk]

@mmun - I made a ton of progress on this, and I changed a sh**-load of stuff, but I stopped and abandoned because:

1. I feel there is a chance the maintainers wouldn't merge it at all or without a ton of back-and-forth (aka time), which I don't have much of.
2. There doesn't seem to be a huge audience that really wants this (only 4 likes on my post above).
3. I decided to just keep my api infrastructure in place and follow JSON-API as a guide and implement just want I need, when I need. For example, when I need to specify fields in my api, I will do it to JSON-API spec, but I just don't need it right now. For serializers/deserializers, I'm just using the stuff over at jsonapi-rb, it seems to be getting a lot of active development at the moment as well. Less complicated code in your project and your gems == easy to maintain and reason about application.
4. and the num 1 reason really, this gem was just too tightly couple to AR and the advanced functionality of the gem (like ordering on a nested field), ended up being a pain to reason about their join table building logic and porting it into sequel. Aka, there is a ton of magic in this thing, which, with a big test suite, is ok I guess, but adding another orm and getting all original specs to pass, is a serious undertaking.

All that said, I'm about 70% done, but I will not finish it. If someone out there wants my code on this and fix the rest of the specs, more than happy to share it and answer any questions!

[mmun]

@Aryk: I completely understand where you're coming from and I am deeply appreciative of the work you've done so far. I also took a stab at this and had a similar feeling. I wish I had noticed your PR earlier so we could join forces.

Re: 1) I'm a bit surprised @lgebhardt hasn't replied here yet because he has always responded quickly to me on gitter and I know that he would love to see support for more ORMs even though he doesn't use Sequel himself.

Re: 3+4) I totally get what you're saying, but I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that we can find the perfect abstractions that please everyone :)

[senid231]

@Aryk I think it will be great improvement to decouple ORM interface. Can you create separate PR for that? If it still WIP and you need help you can count on me :)
I think @lgebhardt will definitely merge it, when work will be done.

After that adding new ORM interfaces will more simple and clear. It can be part of JR or separate gem that works like a plugin for JR

[Aryk]

Pull request created by popular....errr...request. 😄 enjoy!