Return a Function to Avoid Effects

To help write robust, reliable, and easy-to-test software, I always recommend purifying your code of effects. There are a bunch of tricks and techniques to accomplish this sort of thing, and I’m going to share one of my favorites.

I have implemented a pure data pipeline that imports records from one database and puts them in another database with a slightly different schema. Rather than implement all of the logic for saving each entity individually, I’ve created a function migrate that is abstract. The heart of this pipeline is a set of type classes:

{-# language FunctionalDependencies, ScopedTypeVariables, TypeApplications, AllowAmbiguousTypes #-} class LoadData i where load :: IO [ i ] class ConvertData i o | i -> o where convert :: i -> o class SaveData o where save :: [ o ] -> IO () migrate :: forall i o . ( LoadData i , ConvertData i o , SaveData o ) => IO () migrate = do old <- load @ i save ( map convert old )

All of the business logic is in the ConvertData class. The LoadData and SaveData do typically boring things.

A new requirement came in: we are going to import a new record, and we must generate new UUIDs for it.

data Old = Old Int Text data New = New UUID Int Text

These UUID s must be randomly generated. The logical place to generate the UUID is in the ConvertData part of the pipeline. However, this would require adding IO to the method signature, which would make testing and verifying this code more difficult.

Instead, we are going to create a new type:

newtype NeedsUUID = NeedsUUID { giveUUID :: UUID -> New }

Now, our conversion function instances will look like this:

instance LoadData Old where load = loadOldData instance ConvertData Old NeedsUUID where convert ( Old i t ) = NeedsUUID ( \ uuid -> New uuid i t )

We have abstracted the UUID generation. Our ConvertData type class remains pure, and we’ve pushed the implementation detail of UUID generation out.

Now, we implement the SaveData type class, which already had IO .

instance SaveData NeedsUUID where save needsUUIDs = do values <- forM needsUUIDs $ \ needsUUID -> uuid <- freshUUID return ( giveUUID needsUUID uuid ) saveNewValues values

Effects on the Edge

We want to keep effects isolated to the edges of our programs as much as possible. This allows most of our code to remain pure and easy to test and examine. I’ve written about similar topics in my posts Type Safety Back and Forth and Invert Your Mocks!.