scheme constructors and accessors - constructor

USING SCHEME:
I am working on a question in my assignment that asks the follows:
A toy data structure specifies the name of a toy, a description, the acquisition price, and the recommended sales price. Create
constructors and accessors for the toy structure, ensuring that you do
not use Racket’s builtin structs [1 marks]. Using only your accessors
to get at the data in your structure, define a function that sorts a
list of toy structures by the difference between the two prices [2
marks].
Is the question asking to create my own toy data structure with constructors that has the name of the toy,description, and acquisition price and accessors to get the variables of toy like name or description?
if so, how do i do this?
is there a keyword like struct in scheme?

Is the question asking to create my own toy data structure with constructors that has the name of the toy,description, and acquisition price and accessors to get the variables of toy like name or description? if so, how do i do this?
Yes, that's exactly what the assignment says. Hint: a simple list will do, store each field in a position and the accessors will return the element at the position. For instance, if we store the name in the first position, then the accessor will return the car of the list, and so on.
Is there a keyword like struct in scheme?
Yes, oddly enough in Racket is called struct (it's a macro, not a keyword). Also in R7RS (or in SRFI-9) we have record types. But the assignment specifically states that you must not use this!

Related

Freemarker: find specific object in array of arrays

I have a complex many-to-many relationship defined. The cross-reference table is an entity, so I have Contact with a One-To-Many to ContactList, and List with a One-To-Many to Contact List. Contact List contains listID, contactID, and a few Booleans. The relationships seem to work well and on the backend I can get a list of contacts on a review list using the Spring-Data-Jpa findByContactListsIn(Set).
However, I am trying to build a list of contacts in Freemarker, and show whether they were in the current list.
Before I made an Entity out of ContactList, I had a standard Many-To-Many relationship between them, and I was able to do something like this in my .ftl:
<#if list.contacts?seq_contains(contact)>
But I needed to add some data to ContactList specifically, so I needed it to be more complicated. How can I do something similar now? I tried:
<#if list.contactLists?seq_contains(contact)
But of course that always returns false, because it is comparing two different entity types. Is there a way to find if a contact is in one of the contactList objects?
I suppose I could do some back-end trickery, but I am looking for a front-end solution to this.
Don't use ?seq_contains for finding generic object at all. It doesn't call Object.equals, instead it works like the == operator of the template language, which only allows comparing strings, numbers, booleans and dates/times, otherwise it gives you an error. Unfortunately it won't fail in your case, because POJO-s are also strings (and their string value is what toString() returns). This is an unfortunate legacy of the stock ObjectWrapper (scheduled to be fixed in FM3); not even a quirk in the template language. Ideally you get an error there. Instead, now it silently compares the return value of the toString()-s...
Your data-model should already contain what the template should actually display. FTL is not a programming language, so if you try to extract that from the data-model in it, it will be a pain. But, that the data-model contains that data can also mean that some objects in the data-model have methods that extract the data you need. As a last resort, you can add objects that just contain helper methods.
Update: Returning to ?seq_contains, if you need the Java semantics and list is a Java Collection, you can just use the Java API: list?api.contains(contact).

clojure.data.json/write-str: specifying a key function for placing values into aggregate arrays

Suppose I have a simple map, example-map:
(def example-map {"s" {"f" "g"}
"m" {"r" "q"}})
I can use clojure.data.json/write-str to JSON-ify this map as such:
(clojure.data.json/write-str example-map) =>
"{\"s\":{\"f\":\"g\"},\"m\":{\"r\":\"q\"}}"
I'd like to conditionally place some of the values into lists according to the value of their keys.
write-str provides an optional :key-fn, which applies some function to key value pairs. For example, the desired function might specify that all values associated with entries that match "s" are placed in lists.
(clojure.data.json/write-str example-map :key-function desired-function) =>
"{\"s\":[{\"f\":\"g\"}],\"m\":{\"r\":\"q\"}}"
Does anyone know how to specify such a key function that checks for membership of a key in a set and places the values associated with members into an array rendered in the output JSON?
Like your previous question, this is not a job for the JSON parser. You don't need to rely on write-time features of your JSON library to adjust the shape of your JSON maps. Instead, you have a fully functional Turing complete language at your disposal: Clojure! If the maps don't already look the way you want them to be output, then write a function that takes one Clojure map as input and produces a different one as output; then ask your JSON library to write the output map, without any special rules for fiddling with the output.
Now, as it happens this particular JSON library does provide an option named value-fn (not key-function as you claim) to let you modify a value in a map based on its key. So you could use that, in which case you simply need to write a function with a signature like:
(fn [k v]
(...compute new value...))
There are many ways you could write such a function, but they are all entirely divorced from your JSON parser. If you need help writing it, mention some specific things you need help with, so you can get a clear explanation for the part of the process that is actually giving you trouble.

Which one to use Value vs std::string in cocos2d-x V3 C++?

According to http://www.cocos2d-x.org/wiki/Value,
Value can handle strings as well as int, float, bool, etc.
I'm confused when I have to make a choice between using
std::string
or
Value
In what circumstances should I use Value over std::string, and vice versa??
I think you have misunderstood the Value object. As written in the documentation you linked to:
cocos2d::Value is a wrapper class for many primitives ([...] and std::string) plus [...]
So really Value is an object that wraps a bunch of other types of variables, which allows cocos2d-x to have loosely-typed structures like the ValueMap (a hash of strings to Values - where each Value can be a different type of object) and ValueVector (a list of Values).
For example, if you wanted to have a configuration hash with keys that are all strings, but with a bunch of different values - in vanilla C++, you would have to create a separate data structure for each type of value you want to save, but with Value you can just do:
unordered_map<std::string, cocos2d::Value> configuration;
configuration["numEnemies"] = Value(10);
configuration["gameTitle"] = Value("Super Mega Raiders");
It's just a mechanism to create some loose typing in C++ which is a strongly-typed language.
You can save a string in a Value with something like this:
std::string name = "Vidur";
Value nameVal = Value(name);
And then later retrieve it with:
std::string retrievedName = nameVal.asString();
If you attempt to parse a Value as the wrong type, it will throw an error in runtime, since this is isn't something that the compiler can figure out.
Do let me know if you have any questions.

Deserializing json and resolving JPA entities

I have two entities X and Y with the relation #ManyToMany. X has a list of Y's, let's call it yList. Both X and Y has other class members as well (they are not important).
I am using Hibernate as JPA provider, and jackson-databind / jackson-annotations for things like serialization and deserialization.
Now, the following json is received from the client. It has all the fields of X, but only a list of id's for Y. As a concrete example, X could be Person and Y could be Country. And the many-to-many relation captures which countries have been visited by whom.
{
name: 'Bob Dylan',
age: '74',
visitedCountryIds: ['45', '23', '85']
}
When deserializing this json, I want to populate all the fields of the entity X, including yList, such that the elements of yList are resolved by looking up these entities in the database.
My idea so far is to deserialize yList by writing a custom subclass of JsonDeserializer, and have it perform the lookup by id.
Is this a reasonable approach?
You could use #JsonCreator (as already suggested by Uri Shalit) or just a setter method for your property in which you would do necessary lookups from the database.
However, if you have many entities (and associations) for which you want to do this, then this could be a repeated boilerplate code. Also, if implemented in entity classes directly, it would pollute them with database lookup code (readability, SRP, etc).
If you want some generic approach to this, then I think you are on a good way; custom deserializer is the place to implement it.
If I were to implement the generic approach, I would probably introduce a custom annotation which I would place on the association definition together with standard JPA annotations. For example:
#MyCustomJsonIds("visitedCountryIds")
#ManyToMany(...)
private List<Country> countries;
Then, in the deserializer, I would query for the presence of those annotations to dynamically determine what needs to be looked up from the database.
Another option is to create a constructor that that accepts those parameters, annotate it with #JsonCreator and have the constructor perform the lookup from the database, this way you don't need to write a specific deserializer.

Casting objects created in LINQ to SQL to a single master object

I have an interesting problem to solve that would be helped by successfully casting objects created by LINQ to SQL into a single master object that I could pass around. Here is the scenario at a high level.
I have a number of stored procedures that fetch data and then all return the exact same columns. The params into the procs and the logic vary greatly, so a single proc will not work. Then Linq creates a strongly typed object which is used throughout my application as parameter and return values.
I am using these strongly typed objects as noted above as parameters and return values in a series of filters used to analyze stocks. My client would like to change the order the order of the filters. The issue is that each succeeding filter will only work on what passed the last filter.
Currently I am hard coding my parameters, and if I could create a master object that I could cast any of these Linq objects to, I could then always pass and return the master object.
I have read the materials available on the internet about casting between different types such as static to anonymous types or a list of integers and an array list containing objects representing integers, but I need to actually cast one object into another.
What general direction would I take to solve this problem of converting strongly typed objects generated by linq that are exactly the same into a single master object?
Thank you for any of your thoughts.
If all your linq objects have the same fields, you could have them implement an interface defined with those common fields. Then the calls to your filter methods can depend on an interface rather than a specific implementation. In other words, the parameters in the filter methods will be of the interface type rather than a linq class type.
e.g.: Where ICommonFields is an interface you define with all the common fields in each l2s class -
public class Filterer
{
public ICommonFields filterStuff(ICommonFields x)
{
//do stuff
}
}
or -
public class Filterer
{
public T filterStuff<T>(T x)
where T: class, ICommonFields, new()
{
//do stuff
}
}
I'd prefer the generic version, as T becomes the actual type rather than a reference through an interface - linq-to-sql has issues when using a type through an interface with query expressions.
Edit: sorry, it was late when i first wrote this response (likely excuse! :). Fixed my obvious mistake with the example code :)
Although there might be a way to do this with casting, I'm going to offer you a quick and dirty solution - and I'm assuming that your resultant objects are collection-based:
Given that all of your child objects
all share the same columns, go ahead
and pick one of them to act as your
master object - then simply iterate
through the rows of your other LINQ
objects and add them to the collection
of your master object. If your
resultant object is a strongly typed
data table, then all you'd do is Add
to the .Rows collection.
Additionally, you might be able to just add the elements retrieved some subsequent LINQ queries directly to your master object depending upon how you write your SELECT causes in LINQ.