[plt-scheme] Resources in the transformer environment

From: Jon Zeppieri (zeppieri at gmail.com)
Date: Thu Oct 26 17:33:04 EDT 2006

I've been playing around with class.ss, attempting to implement
something similar to Ruby's ActiveRecord class, which provides an
automatic mapping between a class and a relational database table.

I have a rudimentary form of this working, where each column from the
DB table is represented by a field in the class.  This is accomplished
by a macro, dbo-class*, which expands to a class* form.  Since the DB
columns have to be known at expansion time (and since a goal of this
project is to create the class automatically from the DB schema), I
need to connect to the database during macro expansion.  However,
using instances of the created classes obviously requires a connection
to the database during normal runtime.

As far as I can tell, there is no way to do this without creating two
different connections, since the transformer and runtime environments
are kept completely separate.  Now, opening two database connections
isn't such a problem, but I am bothered by the fact that while I can
sensibly manage the runtime connection (e.g., I can use dynamic-wind
to create, use, and close the connection reliably), I'm not sure how
to manage the connection in the transformer environment.

Below is an example of the class's use.  Some information that might
be useful in making sense of it:
  - current-connection is a parameter provided my mysql.ss
  - dbo.ss provides the dbo-class* macro
  - the first parameter to dbo-class* is the name of the database
table to be represented by the class
 - the find method returns instances of the class, each of which
represents a row of the DB table

==============================
(require-for-syntax (lib "mysql.ss" "mysql"))
(begin-for-syntax (current-connection (connect "host.domain.foo" 3306
"my_username" "my_password" "my_schema")))

(require (lib "mysql.ss" "mysql"))
(require (lib "dbo.ss" "dbo"))

(dynamic-wind
 (lambda ()
   (current-connection ()connect "host.domain.foo" 3306 "my_username"
"my_password" "my_schema"))
 (lambda ()
   (define project%
     (dbo-class* "project" object% ()
                 (super-new)))

   (define o (make-object project%))
   (define ps (send o find #:all))
   (display ps))
 (lambda ()
   (close (current-connection))))

(begin-for-syntax (close (current-connection)))

===========================

The above code works fine, but I'd like to use the dbo classes in web
servlets, where I would be a lot more concerned about the lifetime of
database connections.  That final (begin-for-syntax) in the above
example doesn't seem to belong anywhere in a servlet module.

Any ideas?  If it would be at all useful to see the dbo.ss code (or
anything else), I can send it along.

-Jon


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