Hello dear monks!

I regularly met the problem of arbitrary data structures validation, which comes in form either hierarchical config or JSON data. The substantial idea, I got from one of Perl books (I think, this is Hight Order Perl) is the following: the programming languages have tendency to be declarative (i.e. declaring/describing the result, but not the way, how to archive it) but they'll never completely be so, because it seems to be possible only in some local areas.

When such a local area is been invented, then an extremely useful micro-language will appear. For example, well known regular expressions for the area of arbitrary text data matching/extraction. Another successful example I know is the XPath (or XPointer?) technology for nodes matching in XML documents.

The last one seems to be very successful in addressing data nodes, that a lot modules appeared, that try to mimic XPath behaviour: Data::DPath, Data::SPath, Data::PathSimple, Class::XPath.

Well, XML seems to be not too modern, too heavyweight, too enterprisish. So, the minor brother, not overcumbered with namespaces and processing instructions, appeared. It is JSON. The related data extractions/matching technology appeared a bit later; this is JSON pointer: JSON::Pointer, Mojo::JSON::Pointer.

So, my intention was to develop module, which takes the best from the two worlds: declarative data path selection (a-la JSON Pointer and XPath, but not as simple as the first, and (yet) not as complex and feature-rich as the second), and from the perl (closures, flexibility, application agnosticism, DWIM and DRY principles).

Here come a few snipplets, from which you can judge about the module

use Data::DynamicValidator qw/validator/;

my $data = { ports => [2222] };
my $errors = validator($data)->(
  on      => '/ports/*',
  should  => sub { @_ > 0 },
  because => 'At least one port should be defined at "ports" section',
)->errors;

if(!@$errors){
    say "all ok";
}
else {
    say $_->reason for(@$errors);
}

[download]

So, it generally, it uses triplets: on (specifies data path), should (specifies testing perl closure for the results of data path selection), and because (defines human-readable string for administrator to say/describe him the errors in a config, or for HTTP client developer, that something is missing in JSON input data).

A bit more complex example. Say, you want to check that all declared ports should be available for the application at startup. So, you should do the following: 

use Net::EmptyPort qw(check_port);

my $errors = validator($data)->(
  on      => '/ports/*',
  should  => sub { @_ > 0 },
  because => 'At least one port should be defined at "ports" section',
  each    => sub {
      my $port = $_->value;
      shift->report_error("The port $port is not available for usage")
          if(!check_port($port));
  }
)->errors;

[download]

The more complex examples are available in metacpan.

Constructive critique and suggestions are more then welcome!

In reply to Announcing Data::DynamicValidator by basiliscos

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