How does one convert an ASTNode (or at least a CompilationUnit) into a valid piece of source code?
The documentation says that one shouldn't use toString, but doesn't mention any alternatives:
Returns a string representation of this node suitable for debugging purposes only.
CompilationUnits have rewrite, but that one does not work for ASTs created by hand.
Formatting options would be nice to have, but I'd basically be satisfied with anything that turns arbitrary ASTNodes into semantically equivalent source code.
In JDT the normal way for AST manipulation is to start with a basic CompilationUnit and then use a rewriter to add content. Then ASTRewriteAnalyzer / ASTRewriteFormatter should take care of creating formatted source code. Creating a CU just containing a stub type declaration shouldn't be hard, so that's one option.
If that doesn't suite your needs, you may want to experiement with directly calling the internal org.eclipse.jdt.internal.core.dom.rewrite.ASTRewriteFlattener.asString(ASTNode, RewriteEventStore). If not editing existing files, you may probably ignore the events collected in the RewriteEventStore, just use the returned String.
Related
I'm writing a class named "MyObject".
one of the class methods is:
addTo: aCodeString assertType: aTypeCollection
when the method is called with aCodeString, I want to add (in runtime) a new method to "MyObject" class which aCodeString is it's source code and inject type checking code into the source code.
for example, if I call addTo: assertType: like that:
a := MyObject new.
a addTo: 'foo: a boo:b baz: c
^(a*b+c)'
assertType: #(SmallInteger SmallInteger SmallInteger).
I expect that I could write later:
answer := (a foo: 2 boo: 5 baz: 10).
and get 20 in answer.
and if I write:
a foo: 'someString' boo: 5 baz: 10.
I get the proper message because 'someString' is not a SmallInteger.
I know how to write the type checking code, and I know that to add the method to the class in runtime I can use 'compile' method from Behavior class.
the problem is that I want to add the type checking code inside the source code.
I'm not really familiar with all of squeak classes so I'm not sure if I rather edit the aCodeString as a string inside addTo: assertType: and then use compile: (and I don't know how to do so), or that there is a way to inject code to an existing method in Behavior class or other squeak class.
so basically, what I'm asking is how can I inject string into an existing string or to inject code into an existing method.
There are many ways you could achieve such type checking...
The one you propose is to modify the source code (a String) so as to insert additional pre-condition type checks.
The key point with this approach is that you will have to insert the type checking at the right place. That means somehow parsing the original source (or at least the selector and arguments) so as to find its exact span (and the argument names).
See method initPattern:return: in Parser and its senders. You will find quite low level (not most beautiful) code that feed the block (passed thru return: keyword) with sap an Array of 3 objects: the method selector, the method arguments and the method precedence (a code telling if the method is connected to unary, binary or keyword message). From there, you'll get enough material for achieving source code manipulation (insert a string into another with copyReplace:from:to:with:).
Do not hesitate to write small snippets of code and execute in the Debugger (select code to debug, then use debug it menu or ALT+Shift+D). Also use the inspectors extensively to gain more insight on how things work!
Another solution is to parse the whole Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of the source code, and manipulate that AST to insert the type checks. Normally, the Parser builds the AST, so observe how it works. From the modified AST, you can then generate new CompiledMethod (the bytecode instructions) and install it in methodDictionary - see the source code of compile: and follow the message sent until you discover generateMethodFromNode:trailer:. This is a bit more involved, and has a bad side effect that the source code is now not in phase with generated code, which might become a problem once you want to debug the method (fortunately, Squeak can used decompiled code in place of source code!).
Last, you can also arrange to have an alternate compiler and parser for some of your classes (see compilerClass and/or parserClass). The alternate TypeHintParser would accept modified syntax with the type hints in source code (once upon a time, it was implemented with type hints following the args inside angle brackets foo: x <Integer> bar: y <Number>). And the alternate TypeHintCompiler would arrange to compile preconditions automatically given those type hints. Since you will then be very advanced in Squeak, you will also create special mapping between source code index and bytecodes so as to have sane debugger and even special Decompiler class that could recognize the precondition type checks and transform them back to type hints just in case.
My advice would be to start with the first approach that you are proposing.
EDIT
I forgot to say, there is yet another way, but it is currently available in Pharo rather than Squeak: Pharo compiler (named OpalCompiler) does reify the bytecode instructions as objects (class names beginning with IR) in the generation phase. So it is also possible to directly manipulate the bytecode instructions by proper hacking at this stage... I'm pretty sure that we can find examples of usage. Probably the most advanced technic.
Is there any way to have an Alex macro defined in one source file and used in other source files? In my case, I have definitions for $LowerCaseLetter and $UpperCaseLetter (these are all letters except e and O, since they have special roles in my code). How can I refer to these macros from other .x files?
Disproving something exists is always harder than finding something that does exist, but I think the info below does show that Alex can only get macro definitions from the .x file it is reading (other than predefinied stuff like $white), and not via includes from other files....
You can get the sourcecode for Alex by doing the following:
> cabal unpack alex
> cd alex-3.1.3
In src/Main.hs, predefined macros are first set in variables called initSetEnv (charset macros $white, $printable, and "."), and initREEnv (regexp macros, there are none). This gets passed into runP, in src/ParseMonad.hs, which is used to hold the current parsing state, including all defined macros. The initial state is set using the values passed in, but macros can be added using a function called newSMac (or newRMac for regular expression macros).
Since this seems to be the only way that macros can be set, it is then only a matter of some grep bookkeeping to verify the only ways that macros can be added is through an actual macro definition in the source .x file. Unsurprisingly, Alex recursively uses its own .x/.y files for .x source file parsing (src/parser.y, src/Scan.x). It is a couple of levels of indirection away, but you can verify that the only way newSMac can be called is through the src/Scan.x macro
#smac = \$ #id | \$ \{ #id \}
<0> #smac #ws? \= { smacdef }
Other than some obvious predefined stuff, I don't believe reuse in lexers is all that typical anyway, because at the token level things are usually pretty simple (often simple tokens like SPACE, WORD, NUMBER, and a few operators, symbols and parens are all that are needed). The complexity comes at the parsing stage, although for technical reasons, parser-includes aren't that common either (see scannerless parsing for a newer technology that does allow reuse through nesting, like javascript embedded in html.... The tools for scannerless parsing are still pretty primitive though).
I was wondering about some best practices regarding extraction of selectors to constants. As a general rule, it is usually recommended to extract magic numbers and string literals to constants so they can be reused, but I am not sure if this is really a good approach when dealing with selectors in Capybara.
At the moment, I have a file called "selectors.rb" which contains the selectors that I use. Here is part of it:
SELECTORS = {
checkout: {
checkbox_agreement: 'input#agreement-1',
input_billing_city: 'input#billing\:city',
input_billing_company: 'input#billing\:company',
input_billing_country: 'input#billing\:country_id',
input_billing_firstname: 'input#billing\:firstname',
input_billing_lastname: 'input#billing\:lastname',
input_billing_postcode: 'input#billing\:postcode',
input_billing_region: 'input#billing\:region_id',
input_billing_street1: 'input#billing\:street1',
....
}
In theory, I put my selectors in this file, and then I could do something like this:
find(SELECTORS[:checkout][:input_billing_city]).click
There are several problems with this:
If I want to know the selector that is used, I have to look it up
If I change the name in selectors.rb, I could forget to change it somewhere else in the file which will result in find(nil).click
With the example above, I can't use this selector with fill_in(SELECTORS[:checkout][:input_billing_city]), because it requires an ID, name or label
There are probably a few more problems with that, so I am considering to get rid of the constants. Has anyone been in a similar spot? What is a good way to deal with this situation?
Someone mentioned the SitePrism gem to me: https://github.com/natritmeyer/site_prism
A Page Object Model DSL for Capybara
SitePrism gives you a simple, clean and semantic DSL for describing
your site using the Page Object Model pattern, for use with Capybara
in automated acceptance testing.
It is very helpful in that regard and I have adjusted my code accordingly.
NOTE: The scenario is using 2 entity framework models to sync data between 2 databases, but I'd imagine this is applicable to other scenarios. One could try tackling this on the EF side as well (like in this SO question) but I wanted to see if AutoMapper could handle it out-of-the-box
I'm trying to figure out if AutoMapper can (easily :) compare the source and dest values (when using it to sync to an existing object) and do the copy only if the values are different (based on Equals by default, potentially passing in a Func, like if I decided to do String.Equals with StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase for some particular pair of values). At least for my scenario, I'm fine if it's restricted to just the TSource == TDest case (I'll be syncing over int's, string's, etc, so I don't think I'll need any type converters involved)
Looking through the samples and tests, the closest thing seems to be conditional mapping (src\UnitTests\ConditionalMapping.cs), and I would use the Condition overload that takes the Func (since the other overload isn't sufficient, as we need the dest information too). That certainly looks on the surface like it would work fine (I haven't actually used it yet), but I would end up with specifying this for every member (although I'm guessing I could define a small number of actions/methods and at least reuse them instead of having N different lambdas).
Is this the simplest available route (outside of changing AutoMapper) for getting a 'only copy if source and dest values are different' or is there another way I'm not seeing? If it is the simplest route, has this already been done before elsewhere? It certainly feels like I'm likely reinventing a wheel here. :)
Chuck Norris (formerly known as Omu? :) already answered this, but via comments, so just answering and accepting to repeat what he said.
#James Manning you would have to inherit ConventionInjection, override
the Match method and write there return c.SourceProp.Name =
c.TargetProp.Name && c.SourceProp.Value != c.TargetProp.Value and
after use it target.InjectFrom(source);
In my particular case, since I had a couple of other needs for it anyway, I just customized the EF4 code generation to include the check for whether the new value is the same as the current value (for scalars) which takes care of the issue with doing a 'conditional' copy - now I can use Automapper or ValueInject or whatever as-is. :)
For anyone interested in the change, when you get the default *.tt file, the simplest way to make this change (at least that I could tell) was to find the 2 lines like:
if (ef.IsKey(primitiveProperty))
and change both to be something like:
if (ef.IsKey(primitiveProperty) || true) // we always want the setter to include checking for the target value already being set
I'm using Delphi 2007 and I wonder how the following problem can be solved:
I have to translate AComp.Caption for example, but the string that I want to assign to the caption, often depends on some data (for example a date or a number, that gets Formatted). Therefore I have to save the data and the string in a new variable for every translation, which is really annoying.
What I want to do is something like that:
// will add the string and data to an internal list of Translator
// and will then return a DynamicString, which represents the translated value
AComp.Caption := T.NewTranslatedString("Hello %s, do you like cheese?", User)
(Note that AComp.Caption ("Hello %s..") can be changed in different methods)
When switching to another language, you would call T.TranslateAgain() and the value of all strings will be translated and, if data given, formatted again.
Is this possible or do you know another way for solving the given problem?
Thanks in advance
Additional question:
Are strings normal objects, that I can subclass and add dynamic behaviour that changes the string itself in special cases?
Delphi strings are not objects, you can't add behaviours to them. You would need to develop your own class.
The Windows way to localize applications is to get advantage of resources, that can be changed (and loading redirected) without changes to the code (no need to call special functions or add new components), and without run-time calls but to load the resource. The only disadvantage of resources is they cannot be changed easily by the end user. The Delphi 2007 standard localization tools use this approach.
Anyway there are some libraries like dxGetText (which is a port of the GNU gettext library) or TsiLang, for example that use a more "intrusive" approach, requiring changes to your code or adding components. In exchange they can simplify end-user localization.
Before developing your own localization library, I would check if one of the existing ones fits youe needs.
Note: Be aware that Delphi localization tool has significant issues that weren't fixed until XE (which I didn't test yet). See for example QC #79449. Unluckily the fix was never backported to earlier releases.
You can use Delphi's own translator tool. It is able to extract strings and resourcestrings from your source code and form DFM files, and gives you a graphical user interface to translate them to any language. It then creates a resource DLL for each language. The DLL containing the translated strings and DFM data. You should deploy this translation DLL with your project to the destination machine.
In your case, your strings are divided into two groups; fixed strings which do not need any further processing, and parametrized strings which need some additional data to be formatted properly. For the fixed strings, you can just type in the translation into translator tool. For parametrized strings, save each one as a resourcestring and use the resourcestring for formatting them. For example:
resourcestring
strDoYouLikeCheese = 'Hello %s, do you like cheese?';
...
AComp.Caption := Format(strDoYouLikeCheese,[User]);
Now you can use the translator tool or any resource editor to translate the resourcestring into your desired language without the need for changing your source code or recompiling it.
What you want to do is to localize your application. Delphi has support for this, based around the resourcestring keyword. However, I've never done any localization myself so I recommend that you do some websearch for this topic or perhaps wait for the other experts here to supply more detailed help!
You could use a dictionary to keep track of the string mappings, something like this
TTranslator = class
private
FMappings : TDictionary <String, String>;
public
function Translate (const SrcStr : String) : String;
procedure SetMapping (const SrcStr, DestStr : String);
end;
function TTranslator.Translate (const SrcStr : String) : String;
begin
if not FMappings.TryGetValue (SrcStr, Result) then
Result := SrcStr;
end;
procedure TTranslator.SetMapping (const SrcStr, DestStr : String);
begin
FMappings.AddOrSetValue (SrcStr, DestStr);
end;
Translating would then be simply several calls to SetMappings. This gives you a lot of flexiblity. Anyway, you might consider using the built-in localization support or even third-party solutions.
EDIT: Just saw that you are using Delphi 2007, so you don't have TDictionary available. The idea should remain valid, just use any dictionary implementation or a list-based approach.
And to answer the other part of your question: no, strings are not normal object (actually they are not objects at all). They are special in various ways (memory management, copy-on-write behaviour) and it is not possible to subclass them. But that's not what you want anyway if I understood the question correctly.