Play with Reactive Slick: A Simple CRUD application in Play! framework using Slick 3.0

March 3, 2015August 14, 2018 Himanshu GuptaAgile, Future, Non-Blocking, Play Framework, Reactive Application, Slick, Studio-Scala, WebPlay framework, Reactive, reactive slick, scala, slick-3.018 Comments

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Recently Typesafe released Slick 3.0.0-RC1, the first release candidate for “Reactive Slick”. Reactive Slick has many new features like Support for Reactive Streams API, a new API for composing and executing database actions and many more.

Before moving forward, we recommended you to go through the Slick 3.0.0-RC1 Upgrade guide. So, that you can get a hint of major changes in Slick 3.0.

In this post, we will see how to build a Reactive Play application with Reactive Slick. In order to build a simple CRUD application in Play framework using Reactive Slick (Slick-3.0.0-RC1) we need to follow these steps:

1) Run activator new play-reactive-slick play-scala to create a new Play application.

2) Add following dependencies in build.sbt file

"com.typesafe.slick" %% "slick" % "3.0.0-RC1"
"org.slf4j" % "slf4j-nop" % "1.6.4"
"postgresql" % "postgresql" % "9.1-901.jdbc4"

Here we are using PostgreSQL as database. So, if you have not installed it yet, you can download it from here.

3) Next, we need to add bidirectional mapping of our case class with the table, like this:

case class Employee(id: Option[Long], name: String, address: String, dob: Option[Date], joiningDate: Date, designation: Option[String])

class Employees(tag: Tag) extends Table[Employee](tag, "EMPLOYEE") {

implicit val dateColumnType = MappedColumnType.base[Date, Long](d => d.getTime, d => new Date(d))

def id = column[Long]("id", O.PrimaryKey, O.AutoInc)
def name = column[String]("name")
def address = column[String]("address")
def dob = column[Date]("date_of_birth")
def joiningDate = column[Date]("joining_date")
def designation = column[String]("designation")

def * = (id.?, name, address, dob.?, joiningDate, designation.?) <> (Employee.tupled, Employee.unapply _)

Important thing to note in above mapping is that we have omitted O.Nullable/O.NotNull. The reason behind it is that both O.Nullable/O.NotNull are deprecated in Slick-3.0.0-RC1. Instead, we have provided the mapping for optional fields in projection itself.

4) Then, we can write a Database Access Object (DAO) to perform CRUD operations:

object EmployeeDAO {

val employees = TableQuery[Employees]

def db: Database = Database.forDataSource(DB.getDataSource())

def filterQuery(id: Long): Query[Employees, Employee, Seq] =
employees.filter(_.id === id)

def findById(id: Long): Future[Employee] =
try db.run(filterQuery(id).result.head)
finally db.close

def insert(employee: Employee): Future[Int] =
try db.run(employees += employee)
finally db.close

def update(id: Long, employee: Employee): Future[Int] =
try db.run(filterQuery(id).update(employee))
finally db.close

def delete(id: Long): Future[Int] =
try db.run(filterQuery(id).delete)
finally db.close
}

As we can see in above code that now Slick returns result in Future. Also, now the database instance db have an associated connection pool and thread pool, so, it is important to call db.close when we are done using it.

5) At last, we need to provide Asynchronous Action response in controller. Example:

def delete(id: Long): Action[AnyContent] = Action.async { implicit request =>
val futureEmpDel = EmployeeDAO.delete(id)
futureEmpDel.map { result => Home.flashing("success" -> "Employee has been deleted") }.recover {
case ex: TimeoutException =>
Logger.error("Problem found in employee delete process")
InternalServerError(ex.getMessage)
}
}

Here we are using Action.async to handle Future response from database.

In this way we can build a simple CRUD application in Play framework using Reactive Slick. For more information on Reactive Slick click here.

To download a demo Application click here.

Written by Himanshu Gupta

Himanshu Gupta is a software architect having more than 9 years of experience. He is always keen to learn new technologies. He not only likes programming languages but Data Analytics too. He has sound knowledge of "Machine Learning" and "Pattern Recognition". He believes that best result comes when everyone works as a team. He likes listening to Coding ,music, watch movies, and read science fiction books in his free time.

18 thoughts on “Play with Reactive Slick: A Simple CRUD application in Play! framework using Slick 3.03 min read”

Anand Kumar Singh says:

March 3, 2015 at 5:03 PM

Reblogged this on Play!ng with Scala and commented:

Recently Typesafe released Slick 3.0.0-RC1
Pingback: Play with Reactive Slick: A Simple CRUD application in Play! framework using Slick 3.0 | Rishi Khandelwal
Rishi Khandelwal says:

March 3, 2015 at 5:33 PM

Reblogged this on Rishi Khandelwal.
Himanshu Gupta says:

March 4, 2015 at 10:17 AM

Reblogged this on himanshu2014.
anuragknoldus says:

March 16, 2015 at 10:22 AM

Reblogged this on anuragknoldus.
Agdra says:

March 21, 2015 at 8:36 PM

Thank you 😀
guillegr123 says:

March 23, 2015 at 10:55 PM

If you are using JDBC, I guess that you are not using the reactive behavior provided by this reactive slick version.
Niklas Klein says:

March 24, 2015 at 9:25 PM

Thank you for the article, looks really interesting. I took a look at the source to recreate the project and was wondering where your evolutions are coming from. They appear to be auto generated but that is not happening for me, even though I specified the slick.default property in the config file. Is there a way to trigger the generation manually or how is it working for you?
tldeti says:

March 30, 2015 at 4:42 PM

/** Free all resources allocated by Slick for this Database object. In particular, the
* [[slick.util.AsyncExecutor]] with the thread pool for asynchronous execution is shut
* down. If this object represents a connection pool managed directly by Slick, it is also
* closed. */
def close: Unit = try executor.close() finally source.close()
tldeti says:

March 30, 2015 at 4:48 PM

I vote down this post because some newbie I know wrote “finally { db.close()} ” in model class after reading this.
Vu Ngoc Hung says:

April 2, 2015 at 6:38 AM

I tried to change build.sbt, application.conf and then created correspondent table (Employee) on MySQL database. But I had the error message: “[MySQLSyntaxErrorException: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘”date_of_birth” as x6, x9.”address” as x5, x9.”designation” as x8, x9.”id” as x3’ at line 1]”

I tried to debug but couldn’t find the cause.
Could you have a help?
Thanks so much.
1. Vu Ngoc Hung says:
  
  April 2, 2015 at 6:41 AM
  
  Sorry! I my previous post I forgot to write that I want to modify current source codes to run on MySql database instead of PostgresSQL
Taig says:

April 6, 2015 at 7:50 PM

In your DAO object, when you call db.run(), db.close() you are calling the method db. This might give you an other database object which flaws the run/close flow, doesn’t it?
Teolha says:

April 7, 2015 at 2:30 AM

I wonder why you don’t get an exception like: “[PSQLException: Bad value for type long : 2015-04-06 22:36:17]”
Ivan says:

July 1, 2015 at 7:00 PM

Do you have any advice concerning mapped vs. non-mapped tables? Your are using mapped table, but
tuple seems to be the “default” way since it appears in almost all the examples in the documentation and mapped tables only in a dedicated section. Where is the advantage of using tuples, the access is index based and not really type safe. Maybe I’m missing something.
Leo Romanovsky says:

July 31, 2015 at 11:59 PM

Documentation for Play asks you NOT to explicitly perform `db.close`:

https://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.4.0/PlaySlick#Usage
leoromanovsky says:

August 1, 2015 at 12:00 AM

The documentation for Play explicitly says NOT to perform `db.close` in your DAO.

https://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.4.0/PlaySlick#Usage
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