Railjet, architecture for high-speed railway

Maintainability Test Coverage

Railjet

Philosophy

We all know how good it feels to start a greenfield project in Rails. At that point Rails Way makes you move amazingly fast - you just create your models, include some gems in Gemfile and boom, your prototype is almost there. This is what almost every tutorial or a book will show you. But what's going to happen when your app is not generic small-to-mid-size-app? What if you have to start breaking those Rails conventions that made you fall in love with Rails in the first place? That could be because of using multiple data storages, working with legacy URLs or DB schemas, having tons of domain logic that is making your ActiveModel so fat that no diet can help. We all know DHH's answer to that - Concerns. And yeah, they're cool for extracting shared behaviour out of models, but that's it.

Seems like Rails does not have a good answer. But what if someone else already had it? People are writing complex software for decades now, they had to come up with some ideas how to keep them clean, simple and maintainable.

See our wiki for more extended information on railjet why and how

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'railjet'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install railjet

Example Usage

Repository

Assuming your app has 2 ActiveRecord models and uses 1 Cupido object

class Employee < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :events
end

class Event < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :employee
end
# app/repositories/registry.rb
AppRegistry = Railjet::Repository::Registry.new

AppRegistry.register(:employee, EmployeeRepository, record: Employee, cupido: Cupido::Employee)
AppRegistry.register(:event,    EventRepository,    record: Event)
# app/repositories/employee_repository.rb
class EmployeeRepository
  include Railjet::Repository

  delegate :find_contract, to: :cupido

  def employees_with_contract(employees = record.find_all)
    employees.select { |e| find_contract(e).present? }
  end

  class ActiveRecordRepository
    include Railjet::Repository::ActiveRecord    
  end

  class CupidoRepository
    include Railjet::Repository::Cupido

    def find_contract(employee)
      cupido.find(employee.external_id).contract_agreement
    end
  end
end

# app/repositories/event_repository.rb
class EventRepository
  include Railjet::Repository

  delegate :employees,         to: :registry
  delegate :find_for_employee, to: :record

  def events_for_active_employees
    employees.employees_with_contract.map do |e|
      find_for_employee(e)
    end
  end

  class ActiveRecordRepository
    include Railjet::Repository::ActiveRecordRepository

    def find_for_employee(employee)
      record.where(employee_id: employee.id).select(query_columns)
    end
  end
end

UseCase

class UseCase::EditEvent
  include Railjet::UseCase

  # auth module is described below
  check_ability :can_edit_event?  

  # policy module is described below
  check_policy { |event| policy(EventEmployeeHasContract, event) } 

  context      :current_employee
  repositories :events

  def call(id, form)
    event = events.find_by_id(id)

    with_requirements_check(event) do
      event.attributes = form.attributes
      events.persist(event, as: current_employee)
    end
  end
end

Auth

# app/auth/ability.rb
class Auth::Ability < Railjet::Auth::Ability

  def can_edit_event?(event)
    activity(Auth::Event::Edit, event).can_be_edited_by?(actor)
  end

  def can_take_over_event?(event)
    activity(Auth::Event::Edit, event).can_be_taken_over_by?(actor)
  end

  def can_delete_event?(event)
    activity(Auth::Event::Delete, event).can_be_deleted_by?(actor)
  end
end
# app/auth/event/edit.rb
class Auth::Event::Edit < Railjet::Auth::Activity
  def can_be_edited_by?(actor)
  end

  def can_be_taken_over_by?(actor)
  end
end

# app/auth/event/delete.rb
class Auth::Event::Delete < Railjet::Auth::Activity
  def can_be_deleted_by?(actor)
  end
end

Policy

class EventEmployeeHasContract
  object  :event
  context :repository

  validate :employee_has_contract

  private

  def employee_has_contract
    errors.add(:employee, "Inactive Employee") unless repository.employees.find_contract(event.employee)
  end
end

Form

Form is a decorator for request params. In normal Rails app params are just strings, and they're coerced inside ActiveRecord model. We definitely don't want that. We want to coerce and validate as soon as possible.

Of course, not validations are possible to perform in Form object. It doesn't have access to the context, so there are no settings, no repository. Do as much as possible here, and put more complex stuff in policies

class EditForm
  include Railjet::Form

  attribute :name,        String
  attribute :date,        Date
  attribute :employee_id, Integer

  validates_presence_of :name, :date
end

Let's connect everything!

# app/context.rb
class AppContext < Railjet::Context
  def initialize(current_employee:, repository:)
    super
  end
end
# app/controller/events_controller.rb
class EventsController < ApplicationController
  include Railjet::Util::UseCaseHelper
  include Railjet::Util::FormHelper

  def edit
    form  = form(EditForm) # this will raise exception if validation rules are not met
    event = use_case(UseCase::EditEvent).call(params[:id], form)

    respond_with event
  end

  private

  # we need context that will be injected to domain objects
  def context
    AppContext.new(
      current_employee: current_employee,
      repository:       repository
    )
  end

  def repository
    AppRegistry.new(settings: care_provider_settings)
  end

  def object_params
    params[:event]
  end

  # This one is not necessary, but if you need to do something with params
  # before they go into the form, this is the place:
  def clean_params
    dirty_params = super # this calls #object_params
    dirty_params.select { |k,v| v.present? }
  end
end

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, run rake task to bump the version rake version:bump:<major,minor,patch> and then run rake release to release it to https://rubygems.org/

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/nedap/railjet.