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About it

Relay is a data transfer objects structure that allows you to consume third party API payloads and parse them into their proper type object throughout a promotion mapper to ensure given incoming data abides by its expected type.

How does it work?

Relay is a self-contained attribute bag that maps its values using promoters that parse given incoming payloads into valid data transfer objects. Thus, you will have the option to remove the ability to work with unstructured data in your application by using proper types through wrappers that take care of any sanitation and validation logic constraints.

What are promoters?

A promoter is a data structure that allows us to map given data with the desired data type. By doing so, we will be able to guard unknown payloads using proper types. For instance, you can specify that a first_name key value is the type text to prevent the transfer object from being created on constraints failures.

Furthermore, you will have the ability to mark keys value as Any if you are not sure of the data type it belongs to.

Case of study

Let's imagine we are consuming a third party API from an event platform to persist it in our database. Usually, you will be given users information such as email, name or profile URL. This is a pretty challenging case scenario since you will have to validate and sanitize the incoming payload to avoid having inconsistent data in your application.

Now, if you are anything like me, you might be thinking of parsing the incoming payload into an array, and then validate key-value by accessing the array and asking whether we have got the valid information. Such as:

As you can see here, this can go out hands pretty quickly for many reasons. To mention some, we could say the following:

• You will have to repeat yourself every time you need to reference this information in your app.
• These validations do not take into account more complicated validations. Such as, different type of emails, URL or more complex string rules.
• Having unstructured data promotes the way of introducing many bugs into your application by tapping functionality at any given time.

Nevertheless, we are good programmers and like to do better. Furthermore, we love working with types don't we?

Using relay to handle your payloads.

after you have installed the relay data transfer in your application, you will be able to consume the above payload like so

Furthermore, you will be given an Any object wrapper if the asked payload key does not have a specified mapping or was marked as optional using the ::optional() construct method within the promoter object. See example

Note: Any key-value specified in your payload mapper is marked as required

If you would like to know more about the functionality and different uses, please click on here.

Supported types

• [x] boolean
• [x] integer
• [x] Float (floating-point number, aka double)
• [x] string
• [x] mixed
• [x] number
• [x] Url
• [x] Email
• [x] Uuid
• [x] Date

To learn more about their functionality, you can click on the following links:

• Implementation details
• Functionality and uses details

Future scopes.

• [ ] Easier mapping mechanism.
• [ ] Add more types.
• [ ] Add tests for dot array access.
• [ ] Have an idea?

Contributing

Please feel free to fork this package and contribute by submitting a pull request to enhance its functionality.

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.

How can I thank you?

Why not star the github repo and share the link for this repository on Twitter?

Don't forget to follow me on twitter!

Thanks!

Gustavo Ocanto.