DDevelopment & Design

Multi phased processing in scala

Last time in our project we had to add progress bar for visualization of long time running process. Process was made of a few phases and we had to print in which phase we currently are. In first step we conclude that we need to create a class of Progre…

Last time in our project we had to add progress bar for visualization of long time running process. Process was made of a few phases and we had to print in which phase we currently are. In first step we conclude that we need to create a class of Progress which will be passed as an implicit parameter to our service. Then we will wrap method calls be inProgress method which will notify some e.g. akka actor about phase begin and phase end.

But this approach has some disadvantages. Firstly before we start service’s operation we need to init progress with count of all phases to get know ratio of progress finish. With this approach we had to add some extra counting before operation start.

If we want to keep real progress notifications the numbers of phases had to fit count of inPhase blocks. Some of phases were dynamically computed and some where omitted in case of failure validations results. This code become to be unmaintained.

We found that we need to join computation of phases with real phase processing. In this case we need to change approach from building process to building chain of phases that will run the process. Each phase will take the result of previous phase and transform it to new output. So example process will look like this:

Code giving this chain functionality looks like this:

We’ve used right associative operator :: for building chain of phases. “Body” of phases is piped by andThen: processPrevWrapped andThen processNext. For nil-tail we need to have a factory creating empty chain with identity “body” function.

Also if we have this kind of tool, we can modify piping code according to nature of our flow. For example if we are using scalaz.Validation we can do validating chain which will extract a success from n-step output and pass it to input of next step (like flatMap). In the other hand if n-step will return Failure, we will skip all remaining phases of validating chain.

To make building of chain more production-ready we add some extra features:

  • Chaining of chains (sth like ::: in scala Lists)
  • Transforming of input/output – for adding some “glue” code for simpler phases chaining
  • Wrapping of chains – also some “glue” code doing both input and output transformations
  • Sequencing of chains – sequenced processing of multiple phases with the same input

If you are interested in using similar approach, take a look at my github project: scala-phases-chain. If you want to integrate this tool with akka actors, simply change MultiPhasedProgress.notifyAboutStatus method to look like this:

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DDevelopment & Design

Grails session timeout without XML

This article shows clean, non hacky way of configuring featureful event listeners for Grails application servlet context. Feat. HttpSessionListener as a Spring bean example with session timeout depending on whether user account is premium or not.

Common approaches

Speaking of session timeout config in Grails, a default approach is to install templates with a command. This way we got direct access to web.xml file. Also more unnecessary files are created. Despite that unnecessary files are unnecessary, we should also remember some other common knowledge: XML is not for humans.

Another, a bit more hacky, way is to create mysterious scripts/_Events.groovy file. Inside of which, by using not less enigmatic closure: eventWebXmlEnd = { filename -> ... }, we can parse and hack into web.xml with a help of XmlSlurper.
Even though lot of Grails plugins do it similar way, still it’s not really straightforward, is it? Besides, where’s the IDE support? Hello!?

Examples of both above ways can be seen on StackOverflow.

Simpler and cleaner way

By adding just a single line to the already generated init closure we have it done:
class BootStrap {


    def init = { servletContext ->    

        servletContext.addListener(OurListenerClass)    

    }    

}

Allrighty, this is enough to avoid XML. Sweets are served after the main course though :)

Listener as a Spring bean

Let us assume we have a requirement. Set a longer session timeout for premium user account.
Users are authenticated upon session creation through SSO.

To easy meet the requirements just instantiate the CustomTimeoutSessionListener as Spring bean at resources.groovy. We also going to need some source of the user custom session timeout. Let say a ConfigService.
beans = {    

    customTimeoutSessionListener(CustomTimeoutSessionListener) {    

        configService = ref('configService')    

    }    

}

With such approach BootStrap.groovy has to by slightly modified. To keep control on listener instantation, instead of passing listener class type, Spring bean is injected by Grails and the instance passed:
class BootStrap {


    def customTimeoutSessionListener


    def init = { servletContext ->    

        servletContext.addListener(customTimeoutSessionListener)

    }    

}

An example CustomTimeoutSessionListener implementation can look like:
import javax.servlet.http.HttpSessionEvent    

import javax.servlet.http.HttpSessionListener    

import your.app.ConfigService    


class CustomTimeoutSessionListener implements HttpSessionListener {    


    ConfigService configService


    @Override    

    void sessionCreated(HttpSessionEvent httpSessionEvent) {    

        httpSessionEvent.session.maxInactiveInterval = configService.sessionTimeoutSeconds

    }    


    @Override    

    void sessionDestroyed(HttpSessionEvent httpSessionEvent) { /* nothing to implement */ }    

}
Having at hand all power of the Spring IoC this is surely a good place to load some persisted user’s account stuff into the session or to notify any other adequate bean about user presence.

Wait, what about the user context?

Honest answer is: that depends on your case. Yet here’s an example of getSessionTimeoutMinutes() implementation using Spring Security:
import org.springframework.security.core.context.SecurityContextHolder    


class ConfigService {


    static final int 3H = 3 * 60 * 60

    static final int QUARTER = 15 * 60


    int getSessionTimeoutSeconds() {    


        String username = SecurityContextHolder.context?.authentication?.principal    

        def account = Account.findByUsername(username)    


        return account?.premium ? 3H : QUARTER

    }    

}
This example is simplified. Does not contain much of defensive programming. Just an assumption that principal is already set and is a String - unique username. Thanks to Grails convention our ConfigService is transactional so the Account domain class can use GORM dynamic finder.
OK, config fetching implementation details are out of scope here anyway. You can get, load, fetch, obtain from wherever you like to. Domain persistence, principal object, role config, external file and so on...

Any gotchas?

There is one. When running grails test command, servletContext comes as some mocked class instance without addListener method. Thus we going to have a MissingMethodException when running tests :(

Solution is typical:
def init = { servletContext ->

    if (Environment.current != Environment.TEST) {    

        servletContext.addListener(customTimeoutSessionListener)    

    }    

}
An unnecessary obstacle if you ask me. Should I submit a Jira issue about that?

TL;DR

Just implement a HttpSessionListener. Create a Spring bean of the listener. Inject it into BootStrap.groovy and call servletContext.addListener(injectedListener).