automapper - simplest option to only write to destination property if the source property is different? - automapper

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

Related

Converting an ASTNode into code

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.

How to use SWRL rules on Protegé 4.3 using Pellet

I've just started doing work on ontologies with Protegé and I'm trying to understand how to use SWRL rules. I'm afraid I don't get the concept or how to correctly treat them, as I'm not able to produce any output. I'll explain a bit more a simple case I created to test this:
I've created three individuals, called A, B and C. Each one with a test property, that has a boolean range. On the property assertions tab of each one I've initialized their values, so they are test(A,true), test(B,true) and test(C,true). To test how rules work, I created a rule like this: test(A,true), test(B,true) -> test(C,false). The way I understand it is that, if A and B's test property is true, C's one would turn false. To do so, I start the reasoner (Pellet) but nothing happens. I mean, it says the reasoner is active and no "inconsistent ontology" messages appear, but C's test value doesn't change. I'm sure this must be a really simple confusion but I can't seem to find it anywhere nor check if the rule has been activated.
Thank you in advance.
The inference doesnt work like that, you cannot retract test(C, true) if you've asserted it. Your ontology probably includes both test(C, true) and test(C, false) which is completely legal unless you've specified otherwise; in which case then you'd see the inconsistency.

Capybara: Should I get rid of extracted constants or keep them?

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.

How to number floats in LaTeX consistently?

I have a LaTeX document where I'd like the numbering of floats (tables and figures) to be in one numeric sequence from 1 to x rather than two sequences according to their type. I'm not using lists of figures or tables either and do not need to.
My documentclass is report and typically my floats have captions like this:
\caption{Breakdown of visualisations created.}
\label{tab:Visualisation_By_Types}
A quick way to do it is to put \addtocounter{table}{1} after each figure, and \addtocounter{figure}{1} after each table.
It's not pretty, and on a longer document you'd probably want to either include that in your style sheet or template, or go with cristobalito's solution of linking the counters.
The differences between the figure and table environments are very minor -- little more than them using different counters, and being maintained in separate sequences.
That is, there's nothing stopping you putting your {tabular} environments in a {figure}, or your graphics in a {table}, which would mean that they'd end up in the same sequence. The problem with this case (as Joseph Wright notes) is that you'd have to adjust the \caption, so that doesn't work perfectly.
Try the following, in the preamble:
\makeatletter
\newcounter{unisequence}
\def\ucaption{%
\ifx\#captype\#undefined
\#latex#error{\noexpand\ucaption outside float}\#ehd
\expandafter\#gobble
\else
\refstepcounter{unisequence}% <-- the only change from default \caption
\expandafter\#firstofone
\fi
{\#dblarg{\#caption\#captype}}%
}
\def\thetable{\#arabic\c#unisequence}
\def\thefigure{\#arabic\c#unisequence}
\makeatother
Then use \ucaption in your tables and figures, instead of \caption (change the name ad lib). If you want to use this same sequence in other environments (say, listings?), then define \the<foo> the same way.
My earlier attempt at this is in fact completely broken, as the OP spotted: the getting-the-lof-wrong is, instead of being trivial and only fiddly to fix, absolutely fundamental (ho, hum).
(For the afficionados, it comes about because \advance commands are processed in TeX's gut, but the content of the .lof, .lot, and .aux files is fixed in TeX's mouth, at expansion time, thus what was written to the files was whatever random value \#tempcnta had at the point \caption was called, ignoring the \advance calculations, which were then dutifully written to the file, and then ignored. Doh: how long have I know this but never internalised it!?)
Dutiful retention of earlier attempt (on the grounds that it may be instructively wrong):
No problem: try putting the following in the preamble:
\makeatletter
\def\tableandfigurenum{\#tempcnta=0
\advance\#tempcnta\c#figure
\advance\#tempcnta\c#table
\#arabic\#tempcnta}
\let\thetable\tableandfigurenum
\let\thefigure\tableandfigurenum
\makeatother
...and then use the {table} and {figure} environments as normal. The captions will have the correct 'Table/Figure' text, but they'll share a single numbering sequence.
Note that this example gets the numbers wrong in the listoffigures/listoftables, but (a) you say you don't care about that, (b) it's fixable, though probably mildly fiddly, and (c) life is hard!
I can't remember the syntax, but you're essentially looking for counters. Have a look here, under the custom floats section. Assign the counters for both tables and figures to the same thing and it should work.
I'd just use one type of float (let's say 'figure'), then use the caption package to remove the automatically added "Figure" text from the caption and deal with it by hand.

Racket: extracting field ids from structures

I want to see if I can map Racket structure fields to columns in a DB.
I've figured out how to extract accessor functions from structures in PLT scheme using the fourth return value of:
(struct-type-info)
However the returned procedure indexes into the struct using an integer. Is there some way that I can find out what the field names were at point of definition? Looking at the documentation it seems like this information is "forgotten" after the structure is defined and exists only via the generated-accessor functions: (<id>-<field-id> s).
So I can think of two possible solutions:
Search the namespace symbols for ones that start with my struct name (yuk);
Define a custom define-struct macro that captures the ordered sequence of field-names inside some hash that is keyed by struct name (eek).
I think something along the lines of 2. is the right approach (define-struct has a LOT of knobs and many don't make sense for this) but instead of making a hash, just make your macro expand into functions that manipulate the database directly. And the syntax/struct library can help you do the parsing of the define-struct form.
The answer depends on what you want to do with this information. The thing is that it's not kept in the runtime -- it's just like bindings in functions which do not exist at runtime. But they do exist at the syntax level (= compile-time). For example, this silly example will show you the value that is kept at the syntax level that contains the structure shape:
> (define-struct foo (x y))
> (define-syntax x (begin (syntax-local-value #'foo) 1))
> (define-syntax x (begin (printf ">>> ~s\n" (syntax-local-value #'foo)) 1))
>>> #<checked-struct-info>
It's not showing much, of course, but this should be a good start (you can look for struct-info in the docs and in the code). But this might not be what you're looking for, since this information exists only at the syntax level. If you want something that is there at runtime, then perhaps you're better off using alists or hash tables?
UPDATE (I've skimmed too quickly over your question before):
To map a struct into a DB table row, you'll need more things defined: at least hold the DB and the fields it stand for, possibly an open DB connection to store values into or read values from. So it looks to me like the best way to do that is via a macro anyway -- this macro would expand to a use of define-struct with everything else that you'd need to keep around.

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