Our OData parser - looking at filterby

A quick re-cap of where we are so far:

• Learning OMeta through JSON
• Introduction to the OData Parser
• First steps in writing the OData Parser
• Nested resource paths in OData
• Service operations in OData
• Query options in OData
• Paging support in OData

Now I need to tackle $filterby, which is bit of a mammoth, as can be seen from the description from the OData Uri conventions

Eq         Equal                   /Suppliers?$filter=Address/City eq 'Redmond'
Ne         Not equal               /Suppliers?$filter=Address/City ne 'London'
Gt         Greater than            /Products?$filter=Price gt 20
Ge         Greater than or equal   /Products?$filter=Price ge 10
Lt         Less than               /Products?$filter=Price lt 20
Le         Less than or equal      /Products?$filter=Price le 100
And        Logical and             /Products?$filter=Price le 200 and Price gt 3.5
Or         Logical or              /Products?$filter=Price le 3.5 or Price gt 200
Not        Logical negation        /Products?$filter=not endswith(Description,'milk')
Add        Addition                /Products?$filter=Price add 5 gt 10
Sub        Subtraction             /Products?$filter=Price sub 5 gt 10
Mul        Multiplication          /Products?$filter=Price mul 2 gt 2000
Div        Division                /Products?$filter=Price div 2 gt 4
Mod        Modulo                  /Products?$filter=Price mod 2 eq 0
( )        Precedence grouping     /Products?$filter=(Price sub 5) gt 10

And this is before we even have a look at the supported *"functions"* (we'll leave these until the next entry I think!)

Thankfully this is all pretty much the same deal and boils down to simple recursive expression parsing.

Implementing Eq

I'll not do this for all of them, but you can assume I've just implemented them the same way only with "Ge, etc" substituted for whatever...

test("/some/resource?$filterby=Foo eq 2", "OData", function(result) {
  it("A filter should be present", function() {
     assert.notEqual(result.options.$filterby, null)
  })
  it("Filter should be an instance of 'eq'", function() {
     assert.equal(result.options.$filterby[0], "eq")
  })
  it("lhr should be Foo", function() {
     assert.equal(result.options.$filterby[1].name, "Foo")
  })
  it("rhr should be 2", function() {
     assert.equal(result.options.$filterby[2], 2)
  })
})

The idea for this stuff is that I want to generate an AST for further processing by say, a SQL generator. The easiest way to do this is to generate arrays for consumption. This can be ran through a further OMeta processing step to generate SQL later on.

I'm not so comfortable with the bit where I address the filterby[1].name, it feels as addressing down a path should be dealt with in the same way as the rest of the AST (perhaps everywhere else I should be generating an array instead of those nested objects).

I actually have some other ideas about how I'd do this so I'll park that as well (as I'm having a conversation and review of this code tomorrow in the office)

The implementation

FilterByOption = 
  seq("$filterby=")
  FilterByExpression:expr -> { name: "$filterby", value: expr }
,
FilterByExpression =
  PropertyPath:lhs
  seq(" eq ")
  Number:rhs           -> [ "eq", lhs, rhs ]
,

So I'm keeping it simple by making some assumptions that'll get proved wrong in a sec

• Only accepting number for rhs
• Only accepting 'eq as the operand
• PropertyPath is probably not the way to go for this in its current incarnation as mentioned above

Adding not equals

test("/some/resource?$filterby=Foo ne 2", "OData", function(result) {
  it("A filter should be present", function() {
     assert.notEqual(result.options.$filterby, null)
  })
  it("Filter should be an instance of 'ne'", function() {
     assert.equal(result.options.$filterby[0], "ne")
  })
  it("lhr should be Foo", function() {
     assert.equal(result.options.$filterby[1].name, "Foo")
  })
  it("rhr should be 2", function() {
     assert.equal(result.options.$filterby[2], 2)
  })
})

Can be dealt with by saying that our Operand is a choice

FilterByOption = 
  seq("$filterby=")
  FilterByExpression:expr -> { name: "$filterby", value: expr }
,

FilterByExpression =
  PropertyPath:lhs
  FilterByOperand:op
  Number:rhs           -> [ op, lhs, rhs ]
,

FilterByOperand =
  seq(" eq ") -> "eq"
| seq(" ne ") -> "ne"

Can now do the same for

• Gt
• Ge
• Lt
• Le

Like so

FilterByOperand =
  spaces
  (
    seq("eq")
  | seq("ne")
  | seq("gt")
  | seq("ge")
  | seq("lt")
  | seq("le")
  ):op 
  spaces -> op
  ,

Note that I tidied it up, and allowed any white space either side and got rid of my own strings (the last return result is automatically assigned to 'op'

And I'll parameterise the test to get this covered easily and document my progress

function operandTest(op) {
  test("/some/resource?$filterby=Foo " + op + " 2", "OData", function(result) {
    it("A filter should be present", function() {
       assert.notEqual(result.options.$filterby, null)
    })
    it("Filter should be an instance of '" + op + "'", function() {
       assert.equal(result.options.$filterby[0], op)
    })
    it("lhr should be Foo", function() {
       assert.equal(result.options.$filterby[1].name, "Foo")
    })
    it("rhr should be 2", function() {
       assert.equal(result.options.$filterby[2], 2)
    })
  })
}
operandTest("eq")
operandTest("ne")
operandTest("gt")
operandTest("ge")
operandTest("lt")
operandTest("le")

Not everything is a number

Now for the next thing, what can we have as that Rhs? Well, let's go with

• Number (eg 2, 3, 5 )
• QuotedText (eg 'foo', 'bar')

As that's what I can think of from the docs

Here is a test for the quoted string:

  test("/some/resource?$filterby=Foo eq 'bar'", "OData", function(result) {
    it("A filter should be present", function() {
       assert.notEqual(result.options.$filterby, null)
    })
    it("Filter should be an instance of 'eq'", function() {
       assert.equal(result.options.$filterby[0], op)
    })
    it("lhr should be Foo", function() {
       assert.equal(result.options.$filterby[1].name, "Foo")
    })
    it("rhr should be 2", function() {
       assert.equal(result.options.$filterby[2], 'bar')
    })
  })

Same deal again, let's make this extendable

FilterByExpression =
  PropertyPath:lhs
  FilterByOperand:op
  FilterByValue:rhs           -> [ op, lhs, rhs ]
,

With

FilterByValue = 
  Number
| QuotedText

Where QuotedText looks something like this:

QuotedText =
  '\''
  Text:t 
  '\'' -> t
,

Imaginative.

Next up we'll have to think about what else we can expect to see in our expressions - thinking about the Arithmetic operators and grouping operators. shudder