Category: .net

SQLite in ASP.NET 6.0: Access your database file via HTTP Endpoint

It is one of our fundamental principles to always choose the most-easy-while-capable tool for a job. For this, we try not to shower our customers with the newest, most hip technology available, but to use a technology stack we are

  • comfortable with
  • quick to provide the required minimum of customer value
  • keeping enough options open in order anything changes

One of the heavily affected aspects in that regard is the choice of data storage. There are a lot of different design paradigms one can choose from, but with the “most easy” aspect at hand, the question mostly resolves around the needs of the customer, not the wants (or “might be useful one day”) of the developer.

If your customer already has their PostgreSQL databases distributed in their Kubernetes as an example, it might be advisable to aim for that. If the customer does not have any integrated structure yet, I start with the question:

“Is anything more necessary than a single-file database?“

For one of our ASP.NET 6.0 applications, this was answered with the choice of Sqlite, due to it being native to the Microsoft universe including Entity Framework, which has many common use cases already answered, i.e. gives you way of caring about your application logic more than their database abstractions.

(It might be said that for .NET, an interesting project seems to have been LiteDB, which also operates on a single database file, but at the time of this writing, seems to have gone stale in development / support, and therefore fell out of my favour soon. Sad.).

Now we have a project in which we are closely in touch with the customer and their live system, very often had it been useful to access their platform and take a snapshot of the database for backup or assurance of our logic, and with the technical overhead in that specific case (which required several steps of sequentially granting remote access), I thought myself:

Why can’t I have a (sufficiently secured) HTTP endpoint that gives me this SQLite file as a File download?

The solution was a bit tricky because either the file was not read-accessible during that HTTP request (having been open already), the filestream was not possible because it was being closed too early, or the encoding of the resulting file would not fit. What finally worked was:

        private readonly static System.Text.Encoding enc1252 =
            CodePagesEncodingProvider.Instance.GetEncoding(1252);

        [HttpGet("database")]
        public ActionResult GetDatabase()
        {
            var dataSource = "sqlite.db";
            if (!System.IO.File.Exists(dataSource))
            {
                return NotFound(dataSource);
            }
            db.SaveChanges();
            // Note: CloseConnection() was not required!

            using var fs = new FileStream(dataSource, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.ReadWrite);
            var reader = new StreamReader(fs, enc1252);
            var data = reader.ReadToEnd();
            var ms = new MemoryStream(enc1252.GetBytes(data));
            return new FileStreamResult(ms, "application/octet-stream");
        }

Feel free to comment on that way because I found it more than none-trivial to arrive there, but maybe I missed something obvious. Some definite stumbling stones definitively were in

  • The Mime Type “application/octet-stream”, which for some reason would not work with the more adequately sounding choice “application/x-sqlite3” – I have no idea why.
  • The Encoding, which on our system was the Windows CodePages-1252 default, which needed to be specified not only in the interpretation of our bytes stream (second location), but also in the definition of the StreamReader itself (first location).
  • Please note that if your database is encoded via CP-1252, you also need the System.Text.Encoding.CodePages package (available via NuGet)
  • What looks like a missing “using”, is really intentional: If the StreamReader was opened with “using var reader = …”, it had the effect of being disposed before the request was handled correctly – I ran into an error of FileStreamResult: “Cannot access a closed Stream.” – keeping the StreamReader open solved that and the internet told me that this is still not a memory leak; the StreamReader reader gets disposed when the FileStream fs is disposed (see the using in front of that), but it still feels weird.

If you have any comments on that, I’d be very glad to learn from them, but if you don’t and you just have another use case for that problem – I’m happy to help!

WPF Redux Sample Application

A while ago, I wrote about how we are using the redux architexture in our C# applications. I have just pushed an example showing ReduxSimple with WPF and our extensions in a .NET 5 application to our github account. The example itself is just a counter with an increment and a decrement button, but it already shows the whole redux cycle.

The store setup in App.xaml.cs shows how the ReducerBuilder can be used to build a State reducer from the Reducer class via reflection.

I also added a small prime-number factorization to show how to use ‘expensive’ functions in the view part of the application using our SelectorGraph. This makes it possible to properly derive view data from the state, only updating them once when one of their inputs changes. In the example, that is the counter. So the number will only be factorized when the counter changes, while all other future state changes do update the selector.

The example does not use the UIDuplexBinder yet. It allows read/write binding of WPF controls to an IObservable and an action-creator, and is hopefully pretty straight-forward to use. Please enjoy!

Using a C++ service from C# with delegates and PInvoke

Imagine you want to use a C++ service from contained in a .dll file from a C# host application. I was using a C++ service performing some hardware orchestration from a C# WPF application for the UI. This service pushes back events to the UI in undetermined intervals. Let’s write a small C++ service like that real quick:

#include <thread>
#include <string>

using StringAction = void(__stdcall*)(char const*);

void Report(StringAction onMessage)
{
  for (int i = 0; i < 10; ++i)
  {
    onMessage(std::to_string(i).c_str());
    std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::seconds(1));
  }
}

static std::thread thread;

extern "C"
{
  __declspec(dllexport) void __stdcall Start(StringAction onMessage)
  {
    thread = std::thread([onMessage] {Report(onMessage);});
  }

  __declspec(dllexport) void __stdcall Join()
  {
    thread.join();
  }
}

Compile & link this as a .dll that we’ll call Library.dll for now. Catchy, no?

Now we write a small helper class in C# to access our nice service:

class LibraryLoader
{
  public delegate void StringAction(string message);

  [DllImport("Library.dll", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall)]
  private static extern void Start(StringAction onMessage);

  [DllImport("Library.dll", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall)]
  public static extern void Join();

  public static void StartWithAction(Action<string> action)
  {
    Start(x => action(x));
  }
}

Now we can use our service from C#:

LibraryLoader.StartWithAction(x => Console.WriteLine(x));
// Do other things while we wait for the service to do its thing...
LibraryLoader.Join();

If this does not work for you, make sure the C# application can find the C++ Library.dll, as VS does not help you with this. The easiest way to do this, is to copy the dll into the same folder as the C# application files. When you’re starting from VS 2019, that is likely something like bin\Debug\net5.0. You could also adapt the PATH environment variable to include the target directory of your Library.dll.

If you’re getting a BadImageFormatException, make sure the C# application is compiled for the same Platform target as the C++ application. By default, VS builds C++ for “x86”, while it builds C# projects for “Any CPU”. You can change this to x86 in the project settings under Build/Platform target.

Now if this is all you’re doing, the application will probably work fine and report its mysterious number sequence flawlessly. But if you do other things, e.g. something that triggers garbage collection, like this:

LibraryLoader.StartWithAction(x => Console.WriteLine(x));
Thread.Sleep(2000);
GC.Collect();
LibraryLoader.Join();

The application will crash with a very ominous ExecutionEngineException after 2 seconds. In a more realistic environment, e.g. my WPF application, this happened seemingly at random.

Now why is this? The Action<string> we registered to print to the console gets garbage collected, because there is nothing in the managed environment keeping it alive. It exists only as a dependency to the function pointer in C++ land. When C++ wants to message something, it calls into nirvana. Not good. So let’s just store it, to keep it alive:

static StringAction messageDelegate;
public static void StartWithAction(Action<string> action)
{
  messageDelegate = x => action(x);
  Start(messageDelegate);
}

Now the delegate is kept alive in the static variable, thereby matching the lifetime of the C++ equivalent, and the crash is gone. And there you have it, long-lasting callbacks from C++ to C#.

A very strange bug

A week ago, one of our junior programmers encountered a strange bug in his WPF application. This particular application has a main window with pages, i.e. views, that can be switched between, e.g. via the main menu. The first page, however, is the login page. And while on the login page, the main menu should be disabled, so users cannot go where they are not authorized to go.

And this worked fine. A simple boolean in the main window’s view-model was used to disable the menu when in on login page, and enable it otherwise. We have a couple of applications that behave this way, and there were enough examples to get this to work.

Now the programmer introduced a new feature: when the application is started for the first time, there should be a configuration page right after the login page. During the configuration, the main menu should still be disabled. When the user hits the save button on the configuration page, the configuration should be stored and they should get to the dashboard with an enabled main menu.

New Feature, new Bug

Of course, this required changing the condition for when the main menu is disabled: When on either of the two pages, keep it disabled. But now the very strange bug appeared. When going to the dashboard from the configuration page, the main menu was correctly enabled, but all of its menu entries were still disabled. And this only happened when opening the main menu for the first time. When closing and opening it again, all menu entries were correctly enabled.

Now a lot of hands-on debugging ensued. The junior developer used all of the tools at his disposal: web searching, debug output, consulting other senior developers. The leads were plenty, too. Could it be a broken INotifyPropertyChanged implementation? Was ICommand.CanExecute not returning the correct value? Can we attach our own CanExecute handlers to the associated CommandBindings to at least get around the issue? Do we manually have to trigger a refresh of the enabled state?

Nothing worked, and no new information was gained. Even after fiddling around with the problem for a few days, there was no solution, no new insight to be found, not even a workaround. All our code seemed to be working alright.

From good to bad

One of my debugging mantras, that always helped me with the nastiest of bugs, is:

Work from a good, bug-free scenario to the bad, buggy scenario. Use small increments and bisection to find the step that breaks it.

In this situation, we were lucky. We had a good, working scenario in the same application. Starting the application without the “first time configuration” was working nicely. So what was the difference? From the login page the user also hit a button to change to the dashboard page.

The only difference was: the configuration was not stored in between. So we commented that out. Finally! Progress! We could not believe it. Commenting out the “store the configuration” code made our menu items work. Time to dig deeper: The store-the-configuration code was using a helper dialog called TaskDialog that awaits a given Task while showing an “in progress” animation. Our industrious junior developer thought that might be a good idea for storing the configuration data using File.WriteAllTextAsync. Further bisection revealed that it was not actually the “save” Task that was causing the problem, but our TaskDialog: Removing the await from the TaskDialog, our MainWindow‘s main menu was still broken.

This was surprising since the TaskDialog had been in-production, seemingly working alright for quite some time. Yet all our clues hinted at it being the culprit. In its implementation, it runs the given Task directly in its async “Loaded” event handler. Once it is done, it sets the DialogResult to true.

So we hypothesized that it is probably not a good idea to close the dialog while it is currently in the process of opening. The configuration saving task was probably very fast and never yielding, so only that was showing the strange behavior, while all our previous use cases were “slow enough” and yielded at least once.

Hence we tried a small modification: We delayed the execution of our Task and the subsequent DialogResult = true; slightly to the next “event frame” using Application.Current.Dispatcher.InvokeAsync. And that did the trick! The main menu items were finally correctly enabled after leaving the configuration page.

And this is how we solved this very weird bug, where the trigger does not appear to relate to the symptom at all. There is probably still a bug causing this weird behavior somewhere in WPF, but at least we are not longer triggering it with our TaskDialog. Remember, start from the good case, iterate and bisect!

Redux architecture with WPF/C#

For me, the redux architecture has been a game changer in how I write UI programs. All the common problems surrounding observability, which is so important for good UX, are neatly solved without signal spaghetti or having to trap the user in modal dialogs.

For the past two years, we have been working on writing a whole suite of applications in C# and WPF, and most programs in that suite now use a redux-style architecture. We had to overcome a few problems adapting the architecture and our coding style to the platform, but I think it was well worth it.

We opted to use Odonno’s ReduxSimple to organize our state. It’s a nice little library, but it alone does not enable you to write UI apps just yet.

Unidirectional UI in a stateful world

WPF, like most desktop UI toolkits, is a stateful framework. The preferred way to supply it with data is via two-way data binding and custom view-model objects. In order to make WPF suitable for unidirectional UI, you need something like a “controlled mode” for the WPF controls. In that mode, data coming from the application is just displayed and not modified without a round-trip through the application state. This is directly opposing conventional data-binding, which tries to hide the direction of the data-flow.

In other words: we need WPF to call a function when the user changes a value in an input control, but not when we are updating the value from our application state. Since we have control when we are writing to the components, we added a simple “filter” that intercepts our change event handlers in that case. After some evolution of these concepts, we now have this neatly abstracted in a couple of tool functions like this:

public UIDuplexBinder BindInput(TextBox textBox, IObservable<string> observable, Func<string, object> actionCreator)
{
  // ...
}

This updates the TextBox whenever new values are coming in on the IObservable, and when we are not changing the value via that observable, it calls the given action creator and dispatches the action to the store. We have such helper functions for most of our input controls, and similar functions for passive elements like TextBlocks and to show/hide things.

Since this is relatively straight-forward code, we are skipping MVVM and doing this binding directly in the code behind. When our binder functions are not sufficient, which sometimes do more complex updating in view models.

Immutable data

In a Redux-style architecture, observability comes from lightweight diffing, which in turn comes from immutable data updates in your reducers.

System.Collection.Immutable is great for updating the collections in your reducers in a non-mutable way. But their Equals implementation does not behave value-like, which is needed in this case. So in the types that use collections, we use an extension method called LazyEquals that ||s Object.ReferenceEquals and Linq.Enumerable.SequenceEqual.

For the non-collection data, C#9’s record types and with expressions are great. Before switching to .NET 5 earlier this year, we used a utility function from Converto, a companion library of ReduxSimple, that implements a .With via reflection and anonymous types. However, that function silently no-ops when you get the member name wrong in the anonymous type. So we had to write a lot of stupidly simple unit-tests to make sure that no typos slipped through, and our code would survive “rename” refactorings. The new with expressions offload this responsibility to the compiler, which works even better. Nothing wrong with lots of tests, of course.

Next steps

With all this, writing Redux style WPF programs has become a breeze. But one sore spot remains: We still have to supply custom Equals implementations whenever our State types contain a collection. Even when they do not, the generated Equals for records does not early-out via a ReferenceEquals, which can make a Redux-style architecture slower.

This is error prone and cumbersome, so we are currently debating whether this warrants changing C#’s defaults via something like Undefault.NET so the generated Equals for records all do value-like comparison with ReferenceEquals early-outs. Of course, doing something like that is firmly in danger-zone, but maybe the benefits outweigh the risks in this case? This would sure eliminate lots of custom Equals implementations for the price of a subtle, yet somewhat intuitive behavior change. What do you think?

The function that never ended

One of the unwritten laws in procedural programming is that any function you call will, at one point, end. In the presence of exceptions, this does not mean that the function will return gracefully, but it will end non-the-less.

When this does not happen, something very strange is afoot. For example, C’s exit() function ends a program right here and now. But this was a WPF application in C#, only using official libraries. Surely there was nothing like that there. And all I was doing was trying to dispose of my SignalR connection on on program shutdown.

I had registered a delegate for “Exit” in my App.xaml’s <Application>. The SignalR client only implements IAsyncDisposable, so I made that shutdown function asynchronous using the async keyword. I awaited the client’s DisposeAsync and the program just stopped right there, not getting to any code I wanted to dispose of after that. No exception thrown either. Very weird.

Trying to step into the function with a debugger, I learned that the program exited when the SignalR client’s DisposeAsync was awaiting something itself. Just exited normally with exit code 0.

At that point, it became painfully obvious what was happening. async functions do not behave as predictably as normal function. Whenever they are awaiting something, their “tail” is in fact posted to a dispatcher, which resumes the function at that point when the awaited Task is completed. But since I was already exiting my application, the Dispatcher was no longer executing newcomers like the remainder of my shutdown sequence.

To fix this, I reversed the order: when a user triggers an application exit, I first clean up my client and then trigger application exit.

Co-Variant methods on C# collections

C# offers a powerful API for working with collections and especially LINQ offers lots of functional goodies to work with them. Among them is also the Concat()-method which allows to concatenate two IEnumerables.

We recently had the use-case of concatenating two collections with elements of a common super-type:

class Animal {}
class Cat : Animal {}
class Dog : Animal {}

public IEnumerable<Animal> combineAnimals(IEnumerable<Cat> cats, IEnumerable<Dog> dogs)
{
  // XXX: This does not work because Concat is invariant!!!
  return cats.Concat(dogs);
}

The above example does not work because concat requires both sequences to have the same type and returns a combined sequences of this type. If we do not care about the specifities of the subclasses be can build a Concatenate()-method ourselves which make the whole thing possible because instances of both subclasses can be put into a collection of their common parent class.

private static IEnumerable<TResult> Concatenate<TResult, TFirst, TSecond>(
  this IEnumerable<TFirst> first,
  IEnumerable<TSecond> second)
    where TFirst: TResult where TSecond : TResult
{
  IList<TResult> result = new List<TResult>();
  foreach (var f in first)
  {
    result.Add(f);
  }
  foreach (var s in second)
  {
    result.Add(s);
  }
  return result;
}

The above method is a bit clunky to call but works as intended:

public IEnumerable<Animal> combineAnimals(IEnumerable<Cat> cats, IEnumerable<Dog> dogs)
{
  // Works great!
  return cats.Concatenate<Animal, Cat, Dog>(dogs);
}

A variant of the above is a Concatenate()-method can be useful if you use a collection of the parent class to collect instances of subclass collections:

private static IEnumerable<TResult> Concatenate<TResult, TIn>(
  this IEnumerable<TResult> first,
  IEnumerable<TIn> devs)
    where TIn : TResult
{
  IList<TResult> result = first.ToList(); 
  foreach (var dev in devs)
  {
    result.Add(dev);
  }
  return result;
}

public IEnumerable<Animal> combineAnimals(IEnumerable<Cat> cats, IEnumerable<Dog> dogs)
{
  IEnumerable<Animal> result = new List<Animal>();
  result = result.Concatenate(cats);
  return result.Concatenate(dogs);
}

Maybe the above examples can serve as an inspiration for more utility methods that may improve working with collections in C#.

Using (elastic)search with .NET Core

Many modern applications require powerful search mechanisms to become useful and make their users more productive. That is in large part due to the amount of data available to work with. Thankfully there are already powerful tools to index your data and make it searchable.

One of the most well known state-of-the-art solutions is ElasticSearch and it has an API to be used from .NET called NEST. While the documentation is ok I want to give a quick rundown on how to add searching capabilities to your .NET Core application. Some ideas are borrowed from the great post “Using Elasticsearch with ASP.NET Core and Docker“.

Getting ElasticSearch running

The easiest way to get up and running with elasicsearch is to use their docker images and just run the container on your development machine. I like to a docker compose file like the following to get elasticsearch and its tooling application kibana up and running fast:

version: '3.8'
services:
    elasticsearch:
        image: docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.8.0
        container_name: elastic
        environment:
            - node.name=elastic
            - cluster.initial_master_nodes=elastic
        ports:
            - "9200:9200"
            - "9300:9300"
        volumes:
            - type: bind
              source: ./esdata
              target: /usr/share/elasticsearch/data
        networks:
            - esnetwork
    kibana:
        image: docker.elastic.co/kibana/kibana:7.8.0
        ports:
            - "5601:5601"
        networks:
            - esnetwork
        depends_on:
            - elasticsearch
volumes:
    esdata:
networks:
    esnetwork:
        driver: bridge

After you run it with docker compose you can talk to the search service on http://localhost:9200/ and the kibana management GUI on http://localhost:5601/. On the Kibana UI especially the Dev Tools and its console are interesting for experimenting with search queries.

Access ElasticSearch from your .NET Core app

I find it quite elegant to write a extension method for the IServiceCollection to configure the ElasticClient and register it as a Singleton to the dependency injection framework of .NET Core like so

    public static class ElasticSearchExtension
    {
        public static void AddElasticsearch(
            this IServiceCollection services, IConfiguration configuration)
        {
            var url = configuration["elasticsearch:url"];
            var settings = new ConnectionSettings(new Uri(url))
                    .DefaultMappingFor<SearchableDevice>(deviceMapping => deviceMapping
                        .IndexName("devices")
                        .IdProperty(dev => dev.Id)
                    )
                ;
            var client = new ElasticClient(settings);
            var response = client.Indices.Create("devices", creator => creator
                .Map<SearchableDevice>(device => device
                    .AutoMap()
                )
            );
            // maybe check response to be safe...
            services.AddSingleton<IElasticClient>(client);
        }
    }

The configuration block looks like following

  "ElasticSearch": {
    "url": "http://localhost:9200/"
  },

and allows for future extension.

Our search service has to be registered in Startup of course:

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
    ...
    services.AddElasticsearch(Configuration);
}

Indexing our objects

In the above example we built a SearchableDevice class whose public properties are going to be indexed by ElasticSearch. The API allows for a much more fined grained control about what and how to index but we want to keep things simple without having to worry about excluding Properties and so on. If you have set it up that way indexing a SearchableDevice is merely one simple call:

// SearchClient is the injected IElasticClient
// mySearchableDevice is an instance of SearchableDevice
SearchClient.IndexDocument(mySearchableDevice);

Searching for objects

When developing a search query I like to try it in the Kibana Dev Tools and then transform it to a NEST call. A simple query to look in all device properties if they start with “needle” looks like this:

{
  "query": {
    "multi_match": {
      "type": "phrase_prefix", 
      "fields": ["*"],
      "query": "needle"
    }
  }
}

The nice thing about the Kibana Dev Tools console is that it can display and complete the possible values for fields like “type” in your multi_match query.

That search query can then be translated to a NEST call in a straightforward way and looks this way:

var response = SearchClient.Search<SearchableDevice>(sd => sd
    .Query(q => q
        .MultiMatch(query => query
            .Type(TextQueryType.PhrasePrefix)
            .Fields("*")
            .Query("needle")
        )
    )
);

The search response contains the hits with their source objects and some metadata like the score and result count.

Bear in mind that ElasticSearch only returns the first/best 10 matches by default, so specifying the result size often might be closer to what you want.

Wrapping it up

Getting started with ElasticSearch in .NET Core does not require too much boiler plate an setup work if you use tools like docker and the NEST library. Making it usable and tuning the indexing and querying may require a lot of work to achieve the best results. On the other hand smaller applications can start-off with a simple search setup like shown above and simply evolve it when need be.

Data-Oriented Design: Using data as interfaces

A Code Centric World

In main-stream OOP, polymorphism is achieved by virtual functions. To reuse some code, you simply need one implementation of a specific “virtual” interface. Bigger programs are composed by some functions calling other functions calling yet other functions. Virtual functions introduce a flexibility here to that allow parts of the call tree to be replaced, allowing calling functions to be reused by running on different, but homogenuous, callees. This is a very “code centric” view of a program. The data is merely used as context for functions calling each other.

Duality

Let us, for the moment, assume that all the functions and objects that such a program runs on, are pure. They never have any side effects, and communicate solely via parameters to and return values from the function. Now that’s not traditional OOP, and a more functional-programming way of doing things, but it is surely possible to structure (at least large parts of) traditional OOP programs that way. This premise helps understanding how data oriented design is in fact dual to the traditional “code centric” view of a program: Instead of looking at the functions calling each other, we can also look at how the data is being transformed by each step in the program because that is exactly what goes into, and comes out of each function. IS-A becomes “produces/consumes compatible data”.

Cooking without functions

I am using C# in the example, because LINQ, or any nice map/reduce implementation, makes this really staight-forward. But the principle applies to many languages. I have been using the technique in C++, C#, Java and even dBase.
Let’s say we have a recipe of sorts that has a few ingredients encoded in a simple class:

class Ingredient
{
  public string Name { get; set; }
  public decimal Amount { get; set; }
}

We store them in a simple List and have a nice function that can compute the percentage of each ingredient:

public static IReadOnlyList<(string, decimal)> 
    Percentages(IEnumerable<Ingredient> incredients)
{
  var sum = incredients.Sum(x => x.Amount);
    return incredients
      .Select(x => (x.Name, x.Amount / sum))
      .ToList();
}

Now things change, and just to make it difficult, we need a new ingredient type that is just a little more complicated:

class IngredientInfo
{
  public string Name { get; set; }
  /* other useful stuff */
}

class ComplicatedIngredient
{
  public IngredientInfo Info { get; set; }
  public decimal Amount { get; set; }
}

And we definitely want to use the old, simple one, as well. But we need our percentage function to work for recipes that have both Ingredients and also ComplicatedIngredients. Now the go-to OOP approach would be to introduce a common interface that is implemented by both classes, like this: 

interface IIngredient
{
  string GetName();
  string GetAmount();
}

That is trivial to implement for both classes, but adds quite a bunch of boilerplate, just about doubling the size of our program. Then we just replace IReadOnlyList<Ingredient> by IReadOnlyList<IIngredient> in the Percentage function. That last bit is just so violating the Open/Closed principle, but just because we did not use the interface right away (Who thought YAGNI was a good idea?). Also, the new interface is quite the opposite of the Tell, don’t ask principle, but there’s no easy way around that because the “Percentage” function only has meaning on a List<> of them.

Cooking with data

But what if we just use data as the interface? In this case, it so happens that we can easiely turn a ComplicatedIngredient into an Ingredient for our purposes. In C#’s LINQ, a simple Select() will do nicely:

var simplified = complicated
  .Select(x => new Ingredient
   { 
     Name = x.Info.Name,
     Amount = x.Amount
   });

Now that can easiely be passed into the Percentages function, without even touching it. Great!

In this case, one object could neatly be converted into the other, which is often not the case in practice. However, there’s often a “common denominator class” that can be found pretty much the same way as extracting a common interface would. Just look at the info you can retrieve from that imaginary interface. In this case, that was the same as the original Ingredients class.

Further thoughts

To apply this, you sometimes have to restructure your programs a little bit, which often means going wide instead of deep. For example, you might have to convert your data to a homogenuous form in a preprocessing step instead of accessing different objects homogenuously directly in your algorithms, or use postprocessing afterwards.
In languages like C++, this can even net you a huge performance win, which is often cited as the greatest thing about data-oriented design. But, first and foremost, I find that this leads to programs that are easier to understand for both machine and people. I have found myself using this data-centric form of code reuse a lot more lately.

Are you using something like this as well or are you still firmly on the override train, and why? Tell me in the comments!

Getting started with exact arithmetic and F#

In this blog post, I claimed that some exact arithmetic beyond rational numbers can be implemented on a computer. Today I want to show you how that might be done by showing you the beginning of my implementation. I chose F# for the task, since I have been waiting for an opportunity to check it out anyway. So this post is a more practical (first) follow up on the more theoretic one linked above with some of my F# developing experiences on the side.

F# turned out to be mostly pleasant to use, the only annoying thing that happened to me along the way was some weirdness of F# or of the otherwise very helpful IDE Rider: F# seems to need a compilation order of the source code files and I only found out by acts of desperation that this order is supposed to be controlled by drag & drop:

The code I want to (partially) explain is available on github:

https://github.com/felixwellen/ExactArithmetic

I will link to the current commit, when I discuss specifc sections below.

Prerequesite: Rational numbers and Polynomials

As explained in the ‘theory post’, polynomials will be the basic ingredient to cook more exact numbers from the rationals. The rationals themselves can be built from ‘BigInteger’s (source). The basic arithmetic operations follow the rules commonly tought in schools (here is addition):

static member (+) (l: Rational, r: Rational) =
    Rational(l.up * r.down + r.up * l.down,
             l.down * r.down)

‘up’ and ‘down’ are ‘BigInteger’s representing the nominator and denominator of the rational number. ‘-‘, ‘*’ and ‘/’ are defined in the same style and extended to polynomials with rational coefficients (source).

There are two things important for this post, that polynomials have and rationals do not have: Degrees and remainders. The degree of a polynomial is just the number of its coefficients minus one, unless it is constant zero. The zero-polynomial has degree -1 in my code, but that specific value is not too important – it just needs to be smaller than all the other degrees.

Remainders are a bit more work to calculate. For two polynomials P and Q where Q is not zero, there is always a unique polynomial R that has a smaller degree such that:

P = Q * D + R

For some polynomial D (the algorithm is here).

Numberfields and examples

The ingredients are put together in the type ‘NumberField’ which is the name used in algebra, so it is precisely what is described here. Yet it is far from obvious that this is the ‘same’ things as in my example code.

One source of confusion of this approach to exact arithmetic is that we do not know which solution of a polynomial equation we are using. In the example with the square root, the solutions only differ in the sign, but things can get more complicated. This ambiguity is also the reason that you will not find a function in my code, that approximates the elements of a numberfield by a decimal number. In order to do that, we would have to choose a particular solution first.

Now, in the form of unit tests unit tests, we can look at a very basic example of a number field: The one from the theory-post containing a solution of the equation X²=2:

let TwoAsPolynomial = Polynomial([|Rational(2,1)|])
let ModulusForSquareRootOfTwo = 
     Polynomial.Power(Polynomial.X,2) - TwoAsPolynomial
let E = NumberField(ModulusForSquareRootOfTwo)   
let TwoAsNumberFieldElement = NumberFieldElement(E, TwoAsPolynomial)

[<Fact>]
let ``the abstract solution is a solution of the given equation``() =
    let e = E.Solution in  (* e is a solution of the equation 'X^2-2=0' *)
    Assert.Equal(E.Zero, e * e - TwoAsNumberFieldElement)

There are applications of these numbers which have no obvious relation to square roots. For example, there are numberfields containing roots of unity, which would allow us to calculate with rotations in the plane by rational fraction of a full rotation. This might be the topic of a follow up post…