Splitting Persistent Models

Reddit user /u/qseep made a comment on my last blog post, asking if I had any advice for splitting up persistent model definitions:

A schema made using persistent feels like a giant Types module. One change to an entity definition requires a recompile of the entire schema and everything that depends on it. Is there a similar process to break up a persistent schema into pieces?

Yes! There is. In fact, I’ve been working on this at work, and it’s made a big improvement in our overall compile-times. I’m going to lay out the strategy and code here to make it all work out.

You’d primarily want to do this to improve compilation times, though it’s also logically nice to “only import what you need” I guess.

Starting Point and Background

persistent is a database library in Haskell that focuses on rapid productivity and iteration with relatively simple types. It’s heavier than a raw SQL library, but much simpler than something like opaleye or beam . It also offers less features and type-safety than those two libraries. Trade-offs abound!

Usually, persistent users will define the models/tables for their database using the persistent QuasiQuoter language. The examples in the Persistent chapeter in the Yesod book use the QuasiQuoter directly in line with the Haskell code:

share [ mkPersist sqlSettings , mkMigrate "migrateAll" ] [ persistLowerCase | Person name String age Int Maybe deriving Show BlogPost title String authorId PersonId deriving Show |]

The Yesod scaffold, however, loads a file:

-- You can define all of your database entities in the entities file. -- You can find more information on persistent and how to declare entities -- at: -- http://www.yesodweb.com/book/persistent/ share [ mkPersist sqlSettings , mkMigrate "migrateAll" ] $ ( persistFileWith lowerCaseSettings "config/models" )

For smaller projects, I’d recommend using the QuasiQuoter - it causes less problems with GHCi (no need to worry about relative file paths). Once the models file gets big, compilation will become slow, and you’ll want to split it into many files. I investigated this slowness to see what the deal was, initially suspecting that the Template Haskell code was slowing things down. What I found was a little surprising: for a 1,200 line models file, we were spending less than a second doing TemplateHaskell. The rest of the module would take several minutes to compile, largely because the generated module was over 390,000 lines of code, and GHC is superlinear in compiling large modules. (note: this issue was fixed in persistent-template-2.8.0 , which resulted in a massive performance improvement by generating dramatically less code! upgrade!!)

Another reason to split it up is to avoid GHCi linker issues. GHCi can exhaust linker ticks (or some other weird finite resource?) when compiling a module, and it will do this when you get more than ~1,000 lines of models (in my experience).

Split Up Approaches

I am aware of two approaches for splitting up the modules - one uses the QuasiQuoter , and the other uses external files for compilation. We’ll start with external files, as it works best with persistent migrations and requires the least amount of fallible human error checking.

Separate Files

I prepared a GitHub pull request that demonstrates the changes in this section. Follow along for exactly what I did:

In the Yesod scaffold, you have a config/models file which contains all of the entity definitions. We’re going to rename the file to config/models_backup , and we’re going to create a folder config/models/ where we will put the new entity files. For consistency/convention, we’re going to name the files ${EntityName}.persistentmodels , so we’ll end up with this directory structure:

config └── models ├── Comment.persistentmodels ├── Email.persistentmodels └── User.persistentmodels

Now, we’re going to create a Haskell file for each models file.

{-# LANGUAGE EmptyDataDecls #-} {-# LANGUAGE FlexibleInstances #-} {-# LANGUAGE GADTs #-} {-# LANGUAGE GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving #-} {-# LANGUAGE MultiParamTypeClasses #-} {-# LANGUAGE NoImplicitPrelude #-} {-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-} {-# LANGUAGE TemplateHaskell #-} {-# LANGUAGE TypeFamilies #-} module Model.User where import ClassyPrelude.Yesod import Database.Persist.Quasi share [ mkPersist sqlSettings ] $ ( persistFileWith lowerCaseSettings "config/models/User.persistentmodels" )

So far, so good! The contents of the User.persistentmodels file only has the entity definition for the User table:

-- config/models/User.persistentmodels User ident Text password Text Maybe UniqueUser ident deriving Typeable

Next up, we’ll do Email , which is defined like this:

Email email Text userId UserId Maybe verkey Text Maybe UniqueEmail email

Email refers to the UserId type, which is defined in Model.User . So we need to add that import to the Model.Email module.

{-# LANGUAGE EmptyDataDecls #-} {-# LANGUAGE FlexibleInstances #-} {-# LANGUAGE GADTs #-} {-# LANGUAGE GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving #-} {-# LANGUAGE MultiParamTypeClasses #-} {-# LANGUAGE NoImplicitPrelude #-} {-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-} {-# LANGUAGE TemplateHaskell #-} {-# LANGUAGE TypeFamilies #-} module Model.Email where import ClassyPrelude.Yesod import Database.Persist.Quasi import Model.User share [ mkPersist sqlSettings ] $ ( persistFileWith lowerCaseSettings "config/models/Email.persistentmodels" )

We need to do the same thing for the Comment type and module.

Now, we have a bunch of modules that are defining our data entities. You may want to reexport them all from the top-level Model module, or you may choose to have finer grained imports. Either way has advantages and disadvantages.

Migrations

Let’s get those persistent migrations back. If you’re not using persistent migrations, then you can just skip this bit. We’ll define a new module, Model.Migration , which will load up all the *.persistentmodels files and make a migration out of them.

{-# LANGUAGE EmptyDataDecls #-} {-# LANGUAGE FlexibleInstances #-} {-# LANGUAGE GADTs #-} {-# LANGUAGE GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving #-} {-# LANGUAGE MultiParamTypeClasses #-} {-# LANGUAGE NoImplicitPrelude #-} {-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-} {-# LANGUAGE TemplateHaskell #-} {-# LANGUAGE TypeFamilies #-} module Model.Migration where import System.Directory import ClassyPrelude.Yesod import Database.Persist.Quasi mkMigrate "migrateAll" $ ( do files <- liftIO $ do dirContents <- getDirectoryContents "config/models/" pure $ map ( "config/models/" <> ) $ filter ( ".persistentmodels" ` isSuffixOf `) dirContents persistManyFileWith lowerCaseSettings files )

Some tricks here:

You can write do notation in a TemplateHaskell splice, because Q is a monad, and a splice only expects that the result have Q splice where splice depends on syntactically where it’s going. Here, we have Q Exp because it’s used in an expression context. We do a relatively simple scan - get directory contents for our models, then filter to the suffix we care about, and then map the full directory path on there. Finally we call persistManyFileWith , which takes a list of files and parses it into the [EntityDef] .

Now we’ve got migrations going, and our files are split up. This speeds up compilation quite a bit.

QuasiQuotes

If you’re not using migrations, this approach has a lot less boilerplate and extra files you have to mess about with. However, the migration story is a little more complicated.

Basically, you just put your QuasiQuote blocks in separate Haskell modules, and import the types you need for the references to work out. Easy-peasy!

Migrations

Okay, so this is where it gets kind of obnoxious.

In each quasiquote block, you have it generate migrations for your types. Then, you’ll make a Model.Migration file, which will need to import the migrations from each of your Model files and then run them in order. You need to manually topologically sort the migrations based on references, or it will try to create eg foreign keys to tables you haven’t created yet, which borks the migrations.