ToResult

ToResult is a wrapper built over dry-monads to make the Do Notation, Result and Try concepts more handy and consistent to use, especially to implement the Railway Pattern.

dry-monads requires to write boilerplate code everytime we want a method to return a Success or Failure, for example:

def my_method
  Success(another_method.call)
rescue StandardError => e
  Failure(e)
end

yes, we can use Try which makes the code easier to read and faster to write:

def my_method
  Try do
    another_method.call
  end.to_result
end

but I feel like to_result is not really visible at the end of the block and if you forget to write it (as always happens to me) your application blows up.

But this is not the biggest problem, bear with me.

One of the biggest problem is that we cannot use the Do Notation inside a Try block:

# this will return a Failure(Dry::Monads::Do::Halt)
def my_method
  Try do
    yield Failure('error code')
  end.to_result
end

and you cannot even use yield and rescue in the same method:

# this will return a Failure(Dry::Monads::Do::Halt)
def my_method
  yield Failure('error code')
rescue StandardError => e
  # e is an instance of Dry::Monads::Do::Halt
  Failure(e)
end

because they will raise a Dry::Monads::Do::Halt exception and the original error will be forever lost if we do not "unbox" the exception with e.result like this:

def my_method
  yield Failure('error code')
rescue Dry::Monads::Do::Halt => e
  return e.result
rescue StandardError => e
  Failure(e)
end

to be honest this is an implementation detail I don't want to care about while I'm writing my business logic and as far as I've seen this is really hard for junior developers to figure out what is happening with Do::Halt.

With this gem, to-result, that piece of code can be written as:

def my_method
  ToResult do
    yield Failure('error code')
  end
end

and it will return Failure('error code') without all the effort to think about Do::Halt. Moreover, you can keep using ToResult everytime you could have used Try or monads in general, so you have just one way to write monads in your code.

To install with bundler:

bundle add to-result

or with gem:

gem install to-result

To use it with instances of a class, just include it

require 'to_result'

class MyClass
  include ToResultMixin

  def my_method
    ToResult do
      whatever_method.call
    end
  end
end

or if you want to use it with Singleton Classes:

require 'to_result'

class MyClass
  extend ToResultMixin

  class << self
    def my_method
      ToResult do
        whatever_method.call
      end
    end
  end
end

now you can always use ToResult all the time you wanted to use Try or return Success/Failure but with a more convenient interface and consistent behaviour, my goal is to have a solution that can be used for every use-case.

Look at this:

ToResult { raise StandardError.new('error code') }
# returns Failure(StandardError('error code'))

ToResult { yield Success('hello!') }
# returns Success('hello!')

ToResult { yield Failure('error code') }
# returns Failure('error code')

ToResult { yield Failure(StandardError.new('error code')) }
# returns Failure(StandardError('error code'))

ToResult(only: [YourCustomError]) { yield Failure(YourCustomError.new('error code')) }
# returns Failure(YourCustomError('error code'))

ToResult(only: [ArgumentError]) { yield Failure(YourCustomError.new('error code')) }
# raises YourCustomError('error code')

to-result gives you the possibility to define a callback to be called when an error is raised inside the ToResult block, this is a handy place to log errors.

You can define a global callback, usually defined into an initializer:

# initializers/to_result.rb

ToResultMixin.configure do |c|
  c.on_error = Proc.new { |e| Logger.log_error(e) }
end

or a local callback:

ToResult(on_error: proc { |e| Logger.log_error(e) }) do
  yield Failure(StandardError.new('error code'))
end

you can even use both at the same time but keep in mind that local callback overrides the global one.

Changelog

I'm already planning to implement some useful features:

• write more examples/documentation/tests
• configurable error logging when an exception is catched inside DoResult e.g. sending the log to Airbrake or whathever service you are using
• transform/process the catched error => this can be handled with alt_map or other methods already available in dry-monads
• any type of suggestion is appreciated 😁

  gem build to-result
  gem push to-result-<version>.gem

• @a-chris