[Dancer-users] A cleaner config?

[Ovid]

Hi all,

I'm really enjoying Dancer so far. I appreciate the effort everyone's put into it.

This will sound silly to some, but for a long time with Catalyst I was always frustrated by the stash being a hashref since it was so easy to misspell key names. However, the data in the stash is often rather arbitrary that it makes a touch of sense.

With the config, though, data is not arbitrary. It's defined when it's read and should generally be read-only. So I was annoyed when I wrote a test and the very first thing I did was misspell a hash key with the config. So here's what my tests look like now:

    use Weborama::RTB;
    use Dancer::Test;
    use lib 't/lib';
    use FauxObject;

    my $config = FauxObject->new( Weborama::RTB::config() );

    is $config->serializer, 'JSON', 'The config serializer should be JSON';
    is $config->auth->username, '************',
      '... and we should have an auth username';
    ok defined $config->auth->pass, '... and password';                                               
And that outputs:

    t/config.t .. 
    ok 1 - The config serializer should be JSON
    ok 2 - ... and we should have an auth username
    not ok 3 - ... and password
    1..3
    Can't locate object method "pass" via package "FauxObject::__ANON__4".
    Available methods: password, username
     at t/config.t line 16.
    #   Failed test '... and password'
    #   at t/config.t line 16.
    # Looks like you failed 1 test of 3.
    Dubious, test returned 1 (wstat 256, 0x100)
    Failed 1/3 subtests 

Basically, the config hash becomes a read-only collection of objects and if you misspell a hash key (method name), you get a sensible error message and a list of the available methods.

Obviously this only works if the config can be represented as a hashref. If you have config keys which cannot be methods, such as "--foo" or something, you can still reach inside the object $config->{"--foo"}. Note that chaining hash keys works, too ($config->auth->password).

Would this be a reasonable feature for Dancer's config? If an only if the top level config is a hashref, it's blessed as a "Dancer::Config::Object". It should be transparent for the end-user, yes?

Cheers,
Ovid
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