Data Mapper Woes

I love DataMapper, the lightweight Object Relational Mapper for Ruby. We’ve been using it with Sinatra. It’s skinny, it’s simple, it’s clever, it makes the right tables happen in Postgres and the syntax is surprisingly simple. For instance, the email field for a user table:

property :email, unique: true, required: true, format: email_address

Look! It’s amazing – not only do we set the property, but we’ve made it required and unique, and we’ve validated that it’s an email address. Amazing!

I love it, but like all wonderful DSLs when it’s good it’s very very good, but when it’s bad it’s horrid.

In the example I was working on I was creating a user which could be associated with many posts - it was a basic Twitter like app. The user had some requirements as above - specifically those listed for the email, but also that the user name was unique and that the password was more than six characters long. So far so incredibly boring.

I set the wheels in motion, I write a feature test in Cucumber to see if as a user, when logged in, and I create a new post, then the post count goes up by one (I like speaking in Gherkin). Everything looked OK - but the post wasn’t saving. And there were no useful error messages.

Alex Peattie is a hero. He’s left Makers now, but before he did he hacked through what was going on with my problem. And I mean hacked in the manner of destroying briar patches and slaying dragons - my mouth dropped in awe as he systematically got to the source of the problem (“So, let’s force it to save… it saves the post fine, but doesn’t update the user… hmmm…”), then started dropping puts into the DataMapper source code after identifying the problematic lines in the backtrace.

As it turns out, it was the password length that was the problem. As the User was being updated with the new post it is being associated with, the password requirement (6 letters or more) was kicking in - even when no password was being submitted with the update. So the post was fine - just the user didn’t, and so prevented the post from saving.

Simple to fix (just tell the user model to only validate password length on creation), but difficult to identify. I won’t make that mistake again, but Alex remains my hero for sorting that out (and giving a great demonstration debugging). We all miss him.