What should one do, when implementing a Generator, if the underlying data source can experience errors? Generator.next isn’t allowed to throw, only to return nil at the end of the sequence.
The only idea I can think of is to add an `error` property to my Generator implementation, and request that the caller check it after the iteration ends, and/or a `checkForError()` method that can throw an error if there is one:
var q: Query = db.query(…)
for (row in q) { … }
q.checkForError()
As the example implies, this problem comes up when creating Swift bindings for database iterators/cursors. Generator is the obvious protocol to implement, especially since without it you don’t get the idiomatic for/in loop, but the `next` method does have to hit the database, so it has the possibility of I/O errors.
Another possibility is to do all the failable database work up front in the `query` method that creates the Generator, but this means all the results have to be cached in memory, which isn’t scaleable. (Keep in mind I work for a database company <http://couchbase.com/> whose customers often have multi-terabyte data sets.)
I know there’s been a proposal (by Brent Royal-Gordon) to allow property accessors and subscripts to throw, which I strongly endorse, but I think we also need to allow Generators to throw. Fodder for the swift-evolution list…
I think I’d either just end the sequence on an error, or do like you were thinking and have a function/computed property that gives an array containing all the rows which had an error or something.
I’m not a DB guy, though.
- Dave Sweeris
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On Apr 12, 2016, at 1:53 PM, Jens Alfke via swift-users <swift-users@swift.org> wrote:
What should one do, when implementing a Generator, if the underlying data source can experience errors? Generator.next isn’t allowed to throw, only to return nil at the end of the sequence.
The only idea I can think of is to add an `error` property to my Generator implementation, and request that the caller check it after the iteration ends, and/or a `checkForError()` method that can throw an error if there is one:
var q: Query = db.query(…)
for (row in q) { … }
q.checkForError()
As the example implies, this problem comes up when creating Swift bindings for database iterators/cursors. Generator is the obvious protocol to implement, especially since without it you don’t get the idiomatic for/in loop, but the `next` method does have to hit the database, so it has the possibility of I/O errors.
Another possibility is to do all the failable database work up front in the `query` method that creates the Generator, but this means all the results have to be cached in memory, which isn’t scaleable. (Keep in mind I work for a database company <http://couchbase.com/> whose customers often have multi-terabyte data sets.)
I know there’s been a proposal (by Brent Royal-Gordon) to allow property accessors and subscripts to throw, which I strongly endorse, but I think we also need to allow Generators to throw. Fodder for the swift-evolution list…
What I might do is use a block to make sure you can't forget the `checkForError()` method:
let query = db.query(…)
try query.withResults { results in
// `results` is a SequenceType you can iterate over.
// You can only get at it by calling `withResults` on a Query, and it becomes invalid once
// `withResults` returns.
// If `results` encounters an error, it terminates early.
for row in results {
// Use your row
}
}
···
On Apr 12, 2016, at 11:53 AM, Jens Alfke via swift-users <swift-users@swift.org> wrote:
What should one do, when implementing a Generator, if the underlying data source can experience errors? Generator.next isn’t allowed to throw, only to return nil at the end of the sequence.
The only idea I can think of is to add an `error` property to my Generator implementation, and request that the caller check it after the iteration ends, and/or a `checkForError()` method that can throw an error if there is one:
var q: Query = db.query(…)
for (row in q) { … }
q.checkForError()
As the example implies, this problem comes up when creating Swift bindings for database iterators/cursors. Generator is the obvious protocol to implement, especially since without it you don’t get the idiomatic for/in loop, but the `next` method does have to hit the database, so it has the possibility of I/O errors.