Latest / North Meets South Web Podcast / Handling error state, reviewing code, and request data objects

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Handling error state, reviewing code, and request data objects · North Meets South Web Podcast

• 0:08
  Hey, I'm Michael Dyrynda.
• 0:10
  And I'm Jake Bennett.
• 0:11
  and welcome to episode 152 of the North Meets South web podcast.
• 0:20
  You know, I like our long intro music.
• 0:22
  I just, it was such a good song, such a good intro.
• 0:25
  I mean, you know?
• 0:26
  but you listen to all the podcasts now and all of them are just straight into it and,
• 0:31
  and since that is where everybody else.
• 0:36
  We're just following the whole, you know, no uniqueness necessary.
• 0:41
  Just you know, follow the limit lemmings right off the cliff.
• 0:44
  No, no, I put all of my uniqueness into other things.
• 0:48
  It's my hair, my hair.
• 0:52
  Someone said to me the other day, what color is coming next?
• 0:55
  I said, I don't know.
• 0:56
  It's just, Eli's got his school sports day coming up next week, I think.
• 1:01
  So I will, I will go, he's in team blue.
• 1:04
  So I will, I'll put some blue stuff in my hair for that.
• 1:07
  There you go, there you go.
• 1:10
  Nice.
• 1:11
  Hey, it's like that surfer blonde.
• 1:14
  It's nearing the end of the summer, you're mourning the loss of summertime.
• 1:18
  So hey, I get it.
• 1:20
  I understand, I understand.
• 1:21
  Hey, today I got, see if you can tell what I'm showing you.
• 1:26
  got some new AirPods at last.
• 1:28
  Yes, because the old ones were absolute garbage.
• 1:32
  And the only way I know they did it.
• 1:37
  Yeah, and they would the left.
• 1:41
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:42
  then you reset them a few times and they get better and then they crackle again.
• 1:47
  And then it's like really annoying, but you're like, no, it's not that bad.
• 1:51
  Like I don't need to, and then re, and I was complaining to re about it.
• 1:54
  And she's like, just get new ones.
• 1:55
  I said, no, that's fine.
• 1:56
  And then she had
• 1:58
  reason to use them one time and she was like, get new ones now you can't you can't
• 2:03
  do this now
• 2:04
  And like honestly, like my right mic, they wouldn't work if the microphone was on the
• 2:08
  right ear.
• 2:08
  So I had to switch it to the left ear because the microphone stopped working.
• 2:11
  And so like if I ever just had the right one in a phone call came and I couldn't
• 2:14
  pick it up, so that's kind of left was annoying.
• 2:16
  And then when I would put my finger on my left one to like adjust it, it would
• 2:18
  whistle like a whee in my ear.
• 2:21
  Really high pitched.
• 2:22
  Oh, so annoying.
• 2:23
  every now and then.
• 2:24
  And it would just happen at random as well.
• 2:25
  And you'd be like, ah.
• 2:27
  So I think, you know, it's, it's just the AirPods, but yeah, the new, the new ones
• 2:31
  are nice.
• 2:32
  I, they often fall out of my pocket.
• 2:35
  And so they just end up somewhere and it's the worst when they fall out of my pocket
• 2:39
  when I do, you know, bedtime with, with the kids and they're out, they're like
• 2:44
  left in the bed.
• 2:45
  And it's like, so now, you know, they've got fine my they're much better with, but
• 2:50
  like
• 2:51
  The little microphone at the bottom.
• 2:54
  Yeah.
• 2:55
  when you, you know, suspect that you've dropped them in someone's bed because you
• 2:58
  don't want to wake them up with that chirping, but they are quite handy.
• 3:02
  Much easier to find now.
• 3:03
  ones, so let's see if you if you couldn't find them, you can find them.
• 3:05
  There was no, you know, yeah.
• 3:08
  And so
• 3:08
  Orenstein, Adam Wathen school of AirPods, as soon as you have to spend more than 30
• 3:13
  seconds looking for them, you just go on apple.com and you buy Nuance.
• 3:16
  That's it.
• 3:18
  They'll turn up eventually, but you just get another pair.
• 3:21
  I think Adam's got like five or six fixed pairs.
• 3:23
  The last time I saw his, he's, he's like, you know, you know, you go to the swingers
• 3:27
  party and they put the keys in the bowl where he's just got a bowl full of
• 3:30
  AirPods.
• 3:31
  Mm-hmm.
• 3:31
  Yep, just doesn't matter.
• 3:32
  They're all interchangeable.
• 3:33
  Just pick up a pair, put them in your ears.
• 3:35
  That's pretty funny.
• 3:36
  Yeah, that's pretty funny.
• 3:39
  I was looking at AirPod Max and I'm like, I don't know.
• 3:43
  I would consider getting some just for like when I'm sitting down for a long
• 3:45
  coding session.
• 3:46
  Yeah, do you use them?
• 3:48
  Uh, usually only when I go to the office, cause of the, cause like these are good
• 3:53
  for noise canceling, but they don't like block sound, whereas those are much
• 3:58
  better, the over eating to just block out.
• 4:01
  Um, but I don't, when I'm at home, I've just got the app, the home pods here.
• 4:05
  So I've just got the home pods going on all the time.
• 4:07
  I don't really, they're good at night when I want, like there are some TV shows that
• 4:12
  I want to, you know, like we just watch.
• 4:16
  And it's fine if it's like it's dialogue or there's not much going on, but there
• 4:20
  are some shows like Halo, for example.
• 4:22
  I want to watch that with full volume.
• 4:24
  So I'll put the, the max on.
• 4:28
  Is it on what?
• 4:29
  What channel is that?
• 4:30
  Is it on Netflix or is it on Apple TV?
• 4:31
  Plot?
• 4:31
  What is it?
• 4:33
  Oh, Paramount.
• 4:33
  Oh, OK.
• 4:34
  I could get there.
• 4:35
  one had a really strong pilot and then a lot of like filler between episodes like
• 4:41
  two and episode seven, and then like two good episodes or whatever it was, three
• 4:46
  good episodes to close out the season and then kind of ended.
• 4:50
  And then this season I think is much more in line with like the action aspects of
• 4:57
  Halo.
• 4:59
  But I think there's a lot of reticence around the fact that for spoilers, skip
• 5:05
  forward 30 seconds, um, that he, like that they're not wearing their suits.
• 5:11
  Like there's a lot of the, the like not act, there's still action parts, but there
• 5:16
  are a lot of like action parts out of their like master chief suit.
• 5:22
  So, um, I think there's some complaints about that, but they've, they've spent a
• 5:26
  lot of time.
• 5:26
  I look, I, I enjoy it.
• 5:29
  You know, the episodes are 45, 50 minutes, an hour long.
• 5:32
  Did you play Halo as well growing up?
• 5:34
  Like did you know Halo, it's storyline, all that stuff?
• 5:36
  finished all of the like single player Halo games.
• 5:40
  I never got into like ODST or the multiplayer stuff, but yeah.
• 5:44
  to me that'd be like if they came out with like a Half-Life show or something.
• 5:48
  Because I was like, you know, that was my jam when I was a kid, loved that stuff.
• 5:52
  But...
• 5:52
  um, what's going on?
• 5:54
  Something comes out next month.
• 5:56
  There's borderlands, which is a movie that trailer came out a couple of weeks ago.
• 6:01
  And there is fallout.
• 6:02
  I think HBO has picked up and the fallout, um, is, is out next month, which, which
• 6:09
  would be interesting to watch.
• 6:10
  I've, I've never played fallout.
• 6:11
  I couldn't, it gave me the, gave me the, the headaches and the.
• 6:16
  And the head spins of there, there are some games that just do it to me where
• 6:19
  they just, I can't play them because the motion or whatever, they just give me
• 6:23
  terrible headaches and, and stuff.
• 6:25
  So that was one of those games, but I'm, I'm into.
• 6:29
  Watching, you know, TV shows and things like that.
• 6:31
  So I would definitely give that a, give that a go.
• 6:35
  I'm more about a movie than TV series.
• 6:38
  Now, some people will be like, oh yeah, but a TV series can give like so much
• 6:41
  further in depth and everything.
• 6:42
  And it's like, yeah, it can, but I just don't have the patience or the commitment.
• 6:45
  It's like, I want to go and watch two hour movies.
• 6:47
  So I want to watch Dune Two, for example.
• 6:49
  Like it was like three hours.
• 6:50
  It was so good though.
• 6:51
  So good.
• 6:53
  Really long, but really good.
• 6:54
  And I'm glad they didn't make it a TV series.
• 6:56
  It's just not the same.
• 6:57
  Like you can't watch a TV series in IMAX.
• 6:59
  You know what I mean?
• 7:00
  So it's like.
• 7:01
  Well, they're doing Harry Potter.
• 7:03
  They're revisiting Harry Potter.
• 7:04
  I think HBO or Max or whoever they've picked it up and they're going to do like
• 7:07
  each book will be a season of the show.
• 7:10
  So it'd be interesting to see how they kind of do that and pull it off.
• 7:14
  be fine.
• 7:15
  You know, Harry Potter is so popular even I mean, just with even with like the young
• 7:19
  generation now, like my kids love the Harry Potter books.
• 7:22
  And so that's funny.
• 7:23
  It just sticks around.
• 7:25
  It's got a lot of staying power.
• 7:27
  Hey, help me understand here.
• 7:28
  What does reticence mean?
• 7:31
  Like, how about it?
• 7:34
  Yeah.
• 7:37
  It's a Redison like his reservation.
• 7:42
  Yeah.
• 7:42
  It's like when you kind of.
• 7:44
  Resort like people were kind of against it because it's like, people want essentially
• 7:50
  pick up the story and all of the action and whatever, like basically pick up the
• 7:53
  campaign from the game and put it into a TV series, which is like.
• 7:59
  Gamers are always like that.
• 8:00
  They're like, it's not exactly how I want it, then it's no good.
• 8:03
  And it's like, just enjoy the thing for what it is.
• 8:06
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 8:06
  it's like, I read the books, it's not like the books.
• 8:08
  It's like, I know it's different on purpose.
• 8:10
  Like it's not supposed to be the book.
• 8:11
  I learned about this in like eighth grade English, ninth grade English, it's like
• 8:15
  when they adapt books to different mediums, whether TV or movie, they can't
• 8:22
  just do the same thing.
• 8:23
  Like the storytelling has to be different in the visual medium.
• 8:28
  You don't get, you know, the, um, the ex the exposition and like all of the
• 8:34
  explanatory stuff, you don't know what the characters are thinking.
• 8:36
  Like you have to tell the story in a different way.
• 8:39
  And so, yeah, look, it's like, maybe it's not true to the story.
• 8:45
  You know, everyone goes on, there's lots of law around it.
• 8:48
  Um, and, and things like that.
• 8:50
  When Mortal Kombat, the new Mortal Kombat movie that came out a couple of years ago.
• 8:56
  Everyone was kind of like this, there's so much law and the story to Mortal Kombat
• 9:02
  that you didn't have to, like you, you inserted a character into the movie to
• 9:07
  tell the story of like.
• 9:09
  what Mortal Kombat is.
• 9:11
  And I think I see it from that point of view where you're making a movie for a
• 9:16
  certain demographic.
• 9:18
  Like you're making a movie for Mortal Kombat fans.
• 9:20
  But I think they went to the point where they were like, we're trying to bring new
• 9:25
  people into it.
• 9:26
  And I think when you do that, you are making a different piece of media.
• 9:33
  totally.
• 9:34
  to pick up a new audience.
• 9:35
  It's like there's, there's 20 or 30 years of Mortal Kombat.
• 9:38
  People can go back.
• 9:40
  They don't need the backstory.
• 9:41
  They don't need to know, like there are elements of it, but don't like create a
• 9:45
  character to tell the story because you, you don't want to risk people, you know,
• 9:50
  not understanding something so they can go and check that stuff out after.
• 9:54
  I think, you know, that's, that's the same with halo.
• 9:57
  Like just tell a story.
• 10:00
  There we go.
• 10:01
  Well, uh, those, uh, those kind of, uh, 10 minutes of something you didn't come to
• 10:06
  maybe to hear, but maybe you did.
• 10:07
  I don't know.
• 10:08
  Sometimes people are like, Oh no, I like the sort of pre show who literally who
• 10:12
  does.
• 10:13
  I mean, I remember back when we first started, it was, we had people on all the
• 10:16
  time from like, you know, we had, um, freak on and we had Marcel and we had
• 10:22
  Taylor and Adam and you know, all those folks, and now we just get on a chat.
• 10:26
  I mean, maybe we should line up more guests.
• 10:28
  I don't know.
• 10:29
  Maybe.
• 10:31
  Yeah, so guess what I broke out again today?
• 10:34
  Actually yesterday.
• 10:36
  State machines, of course.
• 10:39
  X state for the win.
• 10:41
  So there was this, here's, let me tell you the scenario, okay?
• 10:44
  There was a field and we needed to be able to have a file number entered in the
• 10:48
  field.
• 10:49
  And then when they pressed enter or tabbed out, it needed to go fetch three different
• 10:53
  things.
• 10:54
  And as long as all three of them returned successfully, you needed to put a green
• 10:57
  checkbox in.
• 10:59
  but if it did not, you needed to put a red error symbol.
• 11:03
  Well, if any of them fail, you can immediately put the error symbol in, but
• 11:07
  you have to wait until all three of them succeed to put the green checkbox in,
• 11:11
  right?
• 11:12
  And if you get one success and an error, you just show up throw error.
• 11:16
  But if you get a success after an error, you have to make sure it doesn't change
• 11:19
  back to success because it's not success, it's error, right?
• 11:23
  And then you can't do anything to change that error state or that success state
• 11:27
  unless you
• 11:28
  change the file number, right?
• 11:30
  So if you had, let's say like one, two, three, and it errored, well, we're not
• 11:35
  gonna retry one, two, three unless you change it, because it's invalid, right?
• 11:40
  So it's like, if you change it, if you do on change, then you need to change it back
• 11:45
  to a ready state so it can go from ready to loading again, right?
• 11:49
  So this was a complicated issue.
• 11:50
  And like it became apparent because the developer who was working on it was
• 11:55
  inspecting like five different fields.
• 11:59
  all at the same time to determine what state he was in.
• 12:01
  And it became obvious to me that it wasn't going to work.
• 12:03
  It wasn't going to be sustainable when I was having two icons overlaid on top of
• 12:08
  each other at the same time, right?
• 12:10
  There was like an error icon and a loading icon and a success icon at the same time.
• 12:14
  It was like, how do you get into that weird state?
• 12:16
  But it's possible because you have all these weird...
• 12:18
  Yeah, right.
• 12:19
  Exactly.
• 12:20
  And so Schrodinger's icon.
• 12:23
  Yeah.
• 12:23
  And so anyway, really interesting.
• 12:26
  I should share it.
• 12:27
  But
• 12:28
  state machines to the rescue again.
• 12:30
  Exactly, that's literally what it was.
• 12:32
  And so we had a ready state, a loading state, a success state and an error state.
• 12:36
  But the thing that was cool about this is in the success state, you had two
• 12:42
  different, well, you had a event that I was listening for in the, sorry, in the
• 12:47
  loading state, you had an event that you could listen for, success, okay, or error.
• 12:54
  So if you had error, you'd immediately transition to the error state, right?
• 12:57
  But if you had success,
• 12:59
  you wouldn't do anything immediately.
• 13:00
  You would just kind of wait, right?
• 13:03
  So if you had a success state, what you would do is instead of transitioning to
• 13:05
  another event, you would run an action.
• 13:07
  And the action was increment success count.
• 13:11
  So when you're on loading state, you could accept one of two events, error or
• 13:14
  success.
• 13:15
  Error take you immediately to the error state.
• 13:17
  Success increments the success count.
• 13:20
  But every time you would come to the loading state, again, every time any event
• 13:25
  that it was listening for would come in,
• 13:26
  there was this thing called always, and it would evaluate this statement every time.
• 13:30
  And so what it was, is it was an always, and it was a conditional that said, if
• 13:33
  you've reached a success count of three, then you should target the success state.
• 13:39
  And so it would just, you would hit it, you know, I got success on one of them.
• 13:43
  Okay, great, we'll increment the count.
• 13:45
  Success on another one.
• 13:45
  Okay, great, we'll increment the count.
• 13:47
  Success on the third one.
• 13:47
  Okay, great, we'll increment the count.
• 13:49
  Oh, is it three?
• 13:50
  Yes, it is.
• 13:50
  Transition to that other state.
• 13:52
  So that was the magic sort of.
• 13:54
  stuff there.
• 13:55
  And then the nice thing is, you know, if you transition from the loading state to
• 13:58
  the error state, error state doesn't listen for success events anymore.
• 14:01
  So it doesn't matter.
• 14:02
  You don't if you got a success event after an error, it's not going to change it back
• 14:05
  to success because it can't, it's not listening for that anymore.
• 14:08
  So it was perfect.
• 14:09
  It was just the perfect use case for when you would need the state machine.
• 14:12
  And it's so beautiful.
• 14:14
  Like no, I got rid of literally eight variables.
• 14:17
  Like it was just so nice.
• 14:19
  And so yeah, if you're looking
• 14:21
  that real world example as well, like mindful of the fact that you have this
• 14:25
  talk coming up to kind of like refresh it a little bit if you wanted, you've got a
• 14:29
  real example to use rather than the contrived, you know, I mean, the invoice
• 14:34
  is a good one as any, but having, you know, we're telling the same story, but
• 14:39
  with a different example from a real world application is, is always nice to have.
• 14:44
  And it's not always possible, obviously.
• 14:47
  when, when you're giving a talk to translate like something from your work
• 14:52
  into the talk, but having the ability to do that and having like this tangible
• 14:58
  thing that it's like, I've not just come up with this contrived example, because
• 15:01
  then you have to think about all of the situations in which you might apply that
• 15:05
  or use that for the purposes of telling or giving the talk.
• 15:11
  You've got like, no, these are the things that I have proven to be true with a real
• 15:16
  concrete example.
• 15:17
  Yep, yep, exactly.
• 15:19
  Like this is a real world thing that I actually did that I used this for.
• 15:22
  So anyway, yeah, that was really cool.
• 15:25
  And it cleaned it up a lot and it felt really nice to be like, ah, validate it
• 15:30
  again.
• 15:31
  Like, yes, this is the correct solution for this location.
• 15:33
  Not always is it, but a lot of times it is.
• 15:35
  And so that felt good.
• 15:38
  I was trying to see if there's any of the libraries I could use to do it in a
• 15:40
  smaller form, like in a much smaller way, but it was just like, nah, I'll just go
• 15:44
  back to Xstate, Xstate for JavaScript stuff.
• 15:46
  So.
• 15:47
  So that's good.
• 15:47
  So that was sort of a recent thing I've been working on.
• 15:49
  I mean, other than that, it's basically been just all out sprints, man.
• 15:52
  We've just been killing it.
• 15:54
  Like, we've got so many things in flight right now.
• 15:56
  It's kind of crazy.
• 15:57
  I was messaging a guy that's like a senior and they come to me, Hey, dude, what would
• 16:01
  you think about spending a couple of hours a week, like a day a week, just reviewing
• 16:05
  pull requests for me?
• 16:06
  Just like I just need another set of eyes from a senior to just be take a look and
• 16:11
  say, like, oh, no, it doesn't look right.
• 16:13
  Like, or you didn't think about this or you know what I mean?
• 16:16
  I don't need them to write code.
• 16:17
  I just need them to look at code and just point out areas where it's like that
• 16:20
  doesn't seem like correct.
• 16:21
  You know, because it's like there's like six, seven, eight, nine, ten, twelve pull
• 16:24
  requests out there at a time.
• 16:25
  And it's like I can get to some of them, but I can't get to all of them.
• 16:28
  And it's like I don't want everybody waiting on me.
• 16:30
  So.
• 16:31
  Well, now that, now that we've kind of combined our backend and front end into a
• 16:35
  single repository, there are like 20 or 30 pull requests on the go at any one time
• 16:41
  and it's like, okay, I only want to look at the backend one.
• 16:44
  So I forced everyone to, to tag or label their, their PRs.
• 16:49
  And so I will only look at the backend ones and, and usually only either if I'm
• 16:54
  like between tasks or someone specifically asked me to look at something.
• 16:58
  because my code review, like we all review each other's code, which is good.
• 17:04
  And now that the team has grown, there's, there's people in at different levels that
• 17:07
  like, you can write the code, you can review the code, even like the junior
• 17:10
  reviewing up to a senior's code is good as well, because they can ask, they're going
• 17:14
  to ask questions, they're not just going to assume that something is correct.
• 17:17
  Or they're going to see things in a different way.
• 17:21
  They won't understand things necessarily.
• 17:23
  Like if you use a collection of pipeline, they might ask, what are you doing here?
• 17:26
  Or why did you do it this way?
• 17:27
  Whatever.
• 17:27
  So it's.
• 17:28
  It's good from that perspective to kind of get the team writing more approachable
• 17:32
  code, I think, rather than just like benevolent me reviewing everyone's and it
• 17:37
  like takes a lot of time as well, but I find that when, when I'm in a position to
• 17:41
  review code, the outcomes are very different to when, you know, other people
• 17:46
  are reviewing code and I'll find things that others won't see, or I have a
• 17:50
  different level.
• 17:51
  And there's like a lot of it is also the feel like, you know,
• 17:56
  When, when you're reviewing code, there's the feel of the code.
• 17:59
  preference.
• 18:00
  Yeah, it's just like, hey, this doesn't feel right.
• 18:02
  It's like, well, why?
• 18:03
  Where's the where's the rule that tells me that's not the case?
• 18:05
  It's like, well, there's no rule.
• 18:06
  It's just doesn't feel right.
• 18:07
  rule, but like when you, when you look at like a constructor and using constructor
• 18:13
  property promotion, like where do you draw the line between all of those things being
• 18:16
  on one line?
• 18:17
  Well, sorry, not constructed property promotion is probably not a good example,
• 18:21
  but like a method, where do you draw the line between having all of the parameters
• 18:25
  on one line and when do you start to split it up?
• 18:28
  So it's one per line, you know?
• 18:30
  And it's like,
• 18:32
  And I think like our sort of soft rule is when it gets to like 120 characters, you
• 18:37
  kind of start splitting it up.
• 18:38
  Just, just to kind of make it easier to read, especially now that we're kind of
• 18:43
  embracing types a bit more and we're using more complicated method signatures.
• 18:48
  When you've got like, this is an array or null, you know, that kind of stuff or a
• 18:53
  nullable array, and then you've got like, this is an object of type, whatever.
• 18:57
  And so these things then start taking up more room.
• 19:00
  And it's not just a matter of looking at like dollar variable equals, you know, now
• 19:05
  comma or whatever.
• 19:06
  Now you're looking at like two or three pieces of information potentially for
• 19:11
  every method argument.
• 19:13
  So splitting them up onto one line, you know, each of them being on one line, it
• 19:17
  makes it a bit easier to digest as well.
• 19:20
  And sometimes you might look at it and you go, I'm, you know, passing too many
• 19:23
  variables in here.
• 19:24
  Maybe I've missed something in that.
• 19:27
  You know, it's, you know, that kind of thing where
• 19:32
  rewriting the code in a, in a different visual presentation, you know, from one
• 19:37
  line to five lines makes you sort of stop and think a little bit more about what you
• 19:42
  have actually written and whether or not it is the most appropriate way of writing
• 19:48
  that piece of code.
• 19:49
  You might find, Oh, we need to actually set something as a, as an instance
• 19:53
  property on the, on the class and then reference that rather than passing it
• 19:56
  between methods and so on and so forth.
• 19:58
  So it does help.
• 20:00
  I think to, to reveal some patterns about your own code and certainly makes it
• 20:05
  easier to approach refactoring in terms of like, you know, what it ends up looking
• 20:10
  like.
• 20:11
  Yeah.
• 20:13
  Yeah, or things like, how often should you use a form request?
• 20:17
  If you only have one thing to validate, should you use a form request to do that?
• 20:20
  Or shouldn't you?
• 20:21
  Do you know what I mean?
• 20:22
  Which one should you use?
• 20:23
  So anyway, some of those things are coding standard things.
• 20:25
  You literally could probably, you could enforce those things with Pest's
• 20:31
  architecture plugin and things like that probably.
• 20:33
  But yeah.
• 20:35
  on form requests?
• 20:36
  Cause I know that you're a fan of them.
• 20:39
  Do you use sparsees Laravel data package at all?
• 20:45
  I don't.
• 20:46
  We've talked about it before.
• 20:47
  You and I have actually, and we've been talking about it a little bit inside of
• 20:52
  our other chat as far as like where should like the line be drawn for when a form
• 20:57
  request is used or if you should say like, yeah, we only use form requests up until
• 21:03
  this point.
• 21:04
  So we say, you know, once you're out of the controller, it should no longer be a
• 21:08
  form request.
• 21:08
  It should now be something your domain owns, it should be a DTO, it should be
• 21:11
  something like that.
• 21:12
  Yeah.
• 21:14
  We do have places in our code where the request is literally drilled three layers
• 21:18
  deep, right?
• 21:19
  That's not great.
• 21:22
  So I could see using Spasi's package.
• 21:24
  It certainly makes it a lot easier, right?
• 21:27
  But I'm sure there's some, using any tool for long enough, you'll find the spots in
• 21:32
  which it fails, right?
• 21:33
  Where it's insufficient and you have to do something else.
• 21:36
  So I can't speak to that, though, because we don't use it.
• 21:39
  So I know you guys do, though.
• 21:41
  How's it going with it?
• 21:42
  Yeah.
• 21:42
  All right.
• 21:43
  So I will pose you then a, it's not a hypothetical, it's hypothetical for you,
• 21:48
  but it's the reality for me.
• 21:49
  We have a form request, right?
• 21:51
  It does, it has all of its rules.
• 21:53
  It does the validation.
• 21:55
  We then take that and we pass it into the Laravel data object.
• 22:00
  Now the Laravel data objects have these magic creation methods.
• 22:05
  So you go like person name, colon, colon from.
• 22:11
  And then you pass it the request.
• 22:15
  And what it will do is it will look for either a from request method on the, um,
• 22:26
  on, on that DT, that data object and resolve it using that.
• 22:30
  And then you can do all kinds of creative things like from model or from user model.
• 22:35
  So you could
• 22:36
  You could specifically do this and then Lara the package itself uses reflection
• 22:40
  and some magic to kind of figure out like of these magic creation methods.
• 22:44
  So they all start with from they're all public, they're all static, which one best
• 22:49
  maps to this thing that I have been passed and it kind of instantiates the object now
• 22:55
  from model, from array, from string, these are all fine.
• 22:58
  What I find, and I want to hear your take on this is that if it's building the
• 23:05
  from, if it's building the data object from a request, it does its own validation
• 23:14
  to make sure that all of the input in the request.
• 23:18
  So the stuff you take from like request, input request, Jason, or whatever maps to
• 23:22
  a property on the data object before it calls the from request method.
• 23:30
  Right.
• 23:30
  So in the example of like person data, you might have
• 23:34
  your data object as name, email, phone number, for simplicity sake.
• 23:41
  But in the request, we're capturing first name, last name, email, phone number.
• 23:49
  So because, and because in the specific instance of a request, what it does is it
• 23:55
  passes it through this like pipeline of, um, stuff.
• 24:01
  where it normalizes the request, it does all this other kind of stuff.
• 24:03
  But the thing that has tripped me up is that we'll also do a level of validation,
• 24:10
  that there is a property on your data object that matches your request.
• 24:16
  So keeping in mind that I have a request that has first name, last name, phone, and
• 24:20
  email, and a data object that has name, phone, and email, in my from request
• 24:26
  method, I would then take first name, last name,
• 24:29
  concatenate it into name and then instantiate the object.
• 24:34
  But because the request does not match the DTO exactly, it hits the validation error
• 24:41
  in the Laravel data package that says this field is required, name, name is required,
• 24:47
  but it's not set.
• 24:48
  So then you've got to like do these gymnastics around using this other prepare
• 24:52
  for pipeline method, which then allows you to kind of massage the request into a
• 24:57
  format that matches.
• 24:59
  the DTO, but it just, it kind of muddies things up a little bit, I think.
• 25:05
  Um, and so, and so now we've got like two places doing validation where I would
• 25:11
  expect that all of that request validation happens in the request object and that you
• 25:17
  don't try and magic it up for me in the data object itself.
• 25:22
  Yeah, well, because it's also not even like the rules that you have specified in
• 25:24
  your form requests, right?
• 25:26
  It's different.
• 25:27
  It's like the it's magic rules that aren't even really defined anywhere except for
• 25:30
  you know that the package is going to do it.
• 25:33
  was it's based on the definition of the, so you've, so it's based on what's in the
• 25:40
  constructor, right?
• 25:40
  Public name, public string name.
• 25:43
  Yeah.
• 25:43
  Public string name, public string phone number, public string email.
• 25:46
  Like those are the three things.
• 25:47
  So it would look to see if there is a request.
• 25:51
  I guess the thing that would be nice is if it did something like if it had like a use
• 25:55
  validates before request or something like that, if there was like a trait or
• 25:59
  something that you could turn on or off, because then that would make a lot of
• 26:02
  sense.
• 26:03
  But to say like that from request method is just automatically sort of getting this
• 26:09
  decorator around it that's going to do all the validation stuff like that feels a
• 26:12
  little bit weird.
• 26:12
  It feels like because now what you have to do is you almost have to like
• 26:15
  create your own static method on that thing called from our requests, you know
• 26:19
  what I mean?
• 26:20
  And then pass the form request that way and then handle it by instantiating it
• 26:23
  yourself.
• 26:24
  yeah.
• 26:24
  I mean, the problem is, is that it specifically checks if the input to the
• 26:27
  from method is an instance of request.
• 26:32
  And if it is, it will shove it through this pipeline, right?
• 26:35
  So you don't even get access to your own magic method until it's run through that
• 26:39
  process.
• 26:41
  And so, you know, there are two options, right?
• 26:44
  It's either conform your, your request exactly to the data object.
• 26:50
  Or.
• 26:51
  actually there's three options.
• 26:52
  So the option one is to conform your request.
• 26:55
  The second option is to call from request directly, which then skips the magic
• 27:01
  creation.
• 27:02
  And the third one is to use, which is what we've done, is to use like the without
• 27:07
  validation attribute on those properties to specifically say, don't try and be
• 27:13
  smart about this.
• 27:14
  I know how I'm gonna massage this in the from request method.
• 27:18
  Like I don't...
• 27:19
  And I haven't gone into like the history, the commit history of the, of the package
• 27:23
  or, or to try and figure out like why this was implemented, like what the thought
• 27:26
  process was behind it, but, but for me, um, it, it feels a bit counter, like it's,
• 27:34
  it's not a PHP agnostic package either.
• 27:36
  It's specifically for Laravel.
• 27:39
  So it's like, I'm giving you a form request.
• 27:42
  You know that it's a form request, which I have already validated.
• 27:46
  I want to use the from request method, which I will do the mapping from what's in
• 27:50
  the request to what's in the DTO, but you are preventing that from happening.
• 27:56
  By, you know, doing this level of validation.
• 28:00
  So I just wanted like a second, third, fifth set of eyes at this point is to be
• 28:05
  like, is this weird, like, should I get onto Frank and be like, excuse me.
• 28:12
  because I think what they've done is they've decided to take the road of saying
• 28:18
  that we are going to define the conventions and now you can you can adhere
• 28:22
  to the conventions or you can do the long way and opt out by yourself.
• 28:26
  Right.
• 28:26
  And so I think that's probably the route that they've decided to go and that's very
• 28:29
  spousy of them right like now they so they give you an escape hatch.
• 28:33
  But they're basically saying if you want to use this package, this is the way that
• 28:36
  we use it.
• 28:37
  And we've decided to just
• 28:38
  follow strictly our requests, which maps straight into our DTOs, which maps
• 28:42
  straight into our models, which maps straight into our, you know what I mean?
• 28:44
  Or maybe something like that.
• 28:46
  So if it was me doing it, yeah.
• 28:53
  I mean, I think, let me think about how I would do it.
• 28:57
  If I was doing it myself, what I might do is I might call the from request method
• 29:02
  directly in my controller.
• 29:04
  Yeah.
• 29:05
  And then just let my from request method handle that.
• 29:06
  And then using from request would just do, you know, it's skip the validation stuff.
• 29:11
  And I could still use from anywhere else knowing it's, you know, if I'm using that
• 29:15
  request method, it's not if I'm using that request object, it's not going to work.
• 29:18
  But that's okay.
• 29:18
  I would just use from request in those instances.
• 29:20
  And I guess document well that that's why it is that way.
• 29:26
  Yeah.
• 29:28
  I suppose if you look at it from the perspective of the Laravel data object
• 29:34
  that is created from a form request is being done with the specific intent to
• 29:41
  give a type, to give typed, you know, in, uh, inferred access to the properties.
• 29:48
  Then yes, it makes sense that, you know, this is, this is to replace basically
• 29:53
  that, that request object wholesale.
• 29:57
  And so whatever you map in the DTO needs to match exactly what is in their request.
• 30:03
  And it's to stop you from passing the request around and using like request
• 30:06
  import all the way through.
• 30:08
  Cause you know, we know that that's error prone that you could have a typo in the
• 30:12
  string, you request input, request import, you know, name, and you forget the E and
• 30:18
  it's just nam and then you end up with null can be trickier to diagnose than to
• 30:23
  do request nam on.
• 30:25
  you know, the typed object, which will tell you, no, NAM doesn't exist here.
• 30:29
  So I guess if that's the intent, it's just that, you know, you're not always in
• 30:34
  control of the data coming into that request, I suppose, but you're always in
• 30:38
  control of the, of the data object.
• 30:40
  So maybe, maybe it's a PR that I send to the documentation to say that like, this
• 30:47
  is the specific intent, just to clarify that.
• 30:49
  And like, I'm happy, I'm happy to have the conversation.
• 30:52
  I think with, I think Ruben.
• 30:54
  is responsible for the package to say like, why is it like this?
• 30:58
  And if the, if my understanding based on what we've just said is, is correct, then
• 31:03
  can I send a PR to the docs to say like, this is the intent of using the form
• 31:09
  request, using the from request functionality, and then, and then it's
• 31:13
  like clear and then everyone understands.
• 31:15
  Cause like it tripped me up for ages and I was trying to find a way around it.
• 31:18
  And I was, you know, source diving through the package and it's, it's created in such
• 31:23
  a way that it's.
• 31:24
  Like it makes sense, but it's, you know, you've got to jump through a few classes
• 31:27
  to find out where this behavior is actually happening and then, and going,
• 31:30
  oh, okay, I understand why this is happening now, but I don't understand why
• 31:36
  it's happening kind of thing.
• 31:37
  So.
• 31:38
  Yeah, that makes sense.
• 31:39
  I thought when you originally saying it, you were saying that it would basically
• 31:42
  run the validation step again on your form request.
• 31:44
  I was like, that seems odd.
• 31:46
  Like, it seems like, I got it.
• 31:48
  Yeah.
• 31:49
  like, you know, it's using reflection to find out, you know, what are all the
• 31:52
  properties?
• 31:52
  What are their types?
• 31:53
  Does this thing exist?
• 31:54
  Is it of the correct type?
• 31:55
  And I, and like, because I haven't actually got it working in the way that I
• 31:59
  guess the package intends it to work.
• 32:01
  You know, I assume that if you type it as a string, it's going to use request input.
• 32:05
  But if you, if you type it as an integer, it'll use request integer or request
• 32:09
  Boolean to kind of make sure that all of those types match up for you.
• 32:12
  Here's one other option for you.
• 32:14
  Are you ready?
• 32:15
  The other option you could do is you could, in your form request object, you
• 32:21
  could append a full name attribute to the request in the form request object.
• 32:27
  So you could say like after validation, and then that's going to make sure that
• 32:32
  everything's valid.
• 32:33
  And then you could say, I think it's, I don't remember if it's like this request
• 32:36
  or this attribute push or something like that anyway.
• 32:38
  you can merge or whatever in there.
• 32:40
  Yeah.
• 32:40
  you can set the value, basically.
• 32:42
  And so then you could just do it in there.
• 32:44
  And then any time you get the form request, as long as it's valid, it's going
• 32:47
  to push that value in there.
• 32:48
  And then when you pass it through, it's just going to set it.
• 32:50
  No big deal.
• 32:51
  That way you don't have to do any of that other stuff.
• 32:53
  It would just work.
• 32:55
  And that would work every time.
• 32:56
  I mean, as long as you validated it, I suppose, but what you're going to do, I
• 33:00
  mean, it's going to happen automatically when you use form requests in the
• 33:03
  controller.
• 33:03
  So it's just where do you want to put the logic, you know?
• 33:07
  Yeah.
• 33:08
  I think now having this conversation, having said it out loud, I've like talked
• 33:11
  myself into believing that it is the correct approach with the assumption that
• 33:15
  like, that is exactly what the intent is that, you know, that, that the re that the
• 33:20
  data object should in fact map the request one to one.
• 33:25
  And so yes, you are defining the things in two places, but it does mean that you get
• 33:30
  a typed object as you go.
• 33:33
  you know, through the application depths.
• 33:36
  Yep.
• 33:37
  Exactly.
• 33:38
  hacked around it for now and we're just leaving it as at that, but, um, it'll be
• 33:41
  something to keep in mind for future because like none of the other people on
• 33:44
  my team that had been working with it had encountered this problem.
• 33:47
  And I'm like, have you not encountered, like, are you calling the from request
• 33:52
  method directly?
• 33:53
  Are you or, but I, but if I, I think I figured in the end that they were in fact,
• 33:58
  yeah, doing the mapping of the request, the form requests one to one with the, the
• 34:04
  data object, and that makes sense that they never hit the issue then.
• 34:07
  Yeah, exactly, exactly.
• 34:09
  Yeah, and it is really nice just to have that typed object you can pass around and
• 34:13
  new up in tests and all that stuff without having to have a form request and then
• 34:16
  pass it.
• 34:16
  Yeah, yeah, really nice.
• 34:19
  Well, hey dude, we're at our time.
• 34:22
  Yes, yes, indeed, we are at our time.
• 34:24
  Hey, thanks folks for hanging out with us, 152.
• 34:27
  I was gonna say, not Laravel News.
• 34:29
  I don't know if you saw that audio slash 152 for show notes.
• 34:32
  Hit us up on.
• 34:34
  twitter at Michael Dornett, Jacob Bennett or at North South Audio.
• 34:37
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• 34:40
  Until next time folks, we'll see ya.
• 34:43
  Peace.
• 34:43
  Bye.