In our last post, we had seen how easily we could access MongoDB with the Casbah driver. In this post, we would have a sneak peak at Salat.
Salat is a bidirectional, serialization library which helps us work with MongoDB’s DBObject. To quicly get started with Salat, you would need to include the following dependency in your Build.scala We would also need the dependency for the Casbah driver. The Build.scala would look like
[source language=”scala”]
object ApplicationBuild extends Build {
val appName = "MyCoolPlay"
val appVersion = "1.0"
val appDependencies = Seq(
"com.mongodb.casbah" %% "casbah" % "2.1.5-1",
"com.novus" %% "salat-core" % "0.0.8-SNAPSHOT"
// Add your project dependencies here,
)
val main = PlayProject(appName, appVersion, appDependencies).settings(defaultScalaSettings:_*).settings(
// Add your own project settings here
)
}
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Salat works with case classes. Let us define our model as something like this
[source language=”scala”]
case class Stream(@Key("_id") id: Int, name: String, streamType: String, creator: String)
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Now, we create our DAO which extends the SalatDAO. The SalatDAO is a helper wrapper which eradicates the need to have a lot of boiler plate code. It returns a MongoCursor that extends Iterable typed to our case class. We can limit, skip, sort and then call toList on our results.
For our case, we define the StreamDAO as
[source language=”scala”]
object StreamDAO extends SalatDAO[Stream, Int](collection = MongoConnection()("test")("stream"))
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Now, let us write a test to see that we are able to access the database using the DAO
[source language=”scala”]
import org.scalatest.FunSuite
import org.junit.runner.RunWith
import org.scalatest.junit.JUnitRunner
import com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.compiler.ForEach
import org.scalatest.BeforeAndAfter
import com.mongodb.casbah.commons.MongoDBObject
@RunWith(classOf[JUnitRunner])
class SmallStreamTest extends FunSuite with BeforeAndAfter {
val stream1 = Stream(100, "al1pha", "class", "vikas")
before {
StreamDAO.insert(stream1)
}
test("Insert and retrieve a stream") {
val streams = StreamDAO.find(MongoDBObject("name" -> ".*".r))
assert(streams.size === 1)
}
after {
StreamDAO.remove(stream1)
}
}
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As you can see, we can insert our object using StreamDAO.insert(stream1) and retrieve it using one of the many convenience methods provided by StreamDAO i.e StreamDAO.find(MongoDBObject(“name” -> “.*”.r))
Here we are using a regular expression “.*” to match all the names.
In our next post, we will look at accessing this functionality via Play framework so that we can display it using a Play controller.
