A CouchDB Mess

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With my important scenarios complete, I would like to start applying CSS to the homepage. Before I can do that...

I need to load many more meals and recipes into my development database than I currently have. I could manually load them, but that's a hassle. I would much prefer to drop the development database and then seed all of the data from scratch. I can do that, but I have no way to load my CouchDB views.

For testing purposes, I have been loading my CouchDB views in Cucumber's features/support/env.rb:

Before do
  $rspec_mocks ||= Spec::Mocks::Space.new

  RestClient.put @@db, { }

  # TODO need to accomplish this via CouchDB migrations
  lucene_index_function = <<_JS
function(doc) {
  var ret = new Document();

  function zero_pad(i, number_of_zeroes) {
...
}
_JS

  doc = { 'transform' => lucene_index_function }

  RestClient.put "#{@@db}/_design/lucene",
    doc.to_json,
    :content_type => 'application/json'

  meals_view = <<_JS
{
  "views": {
    "by_year": {
      "map": "function (doc) {
...
  },
  "language": "javascript"
}
_JS

   RestClient.put "#{@@db}/_design/meals",
     meals_view,
     :content_type => 'application/json'

  recipes_view = <<_JS
{
  "views": {
    "by_date": {
...
  },
  "language": "javascript"
}
_JS

  RestClient.put "#{@@db}/_design/recipes",
    recipes_view,
    :content_type => 'application/json'
end

Each one of those "..." represents a lot of CouchDB code that clogs up the features/support/env.rb. Clogs it up in way that is not at all re-usable.

I create a couch/_design directory to hold these views:

mkdir -p couch/_design

In there, I create three JSON files: couch/_design/lucene.json, couch/_design/recipes.json and couch/_design/meals.json.

I can then reduce Before block to:

Before do
  # For mocking & stubbing in Cucumber
  $rspec_mocks ||= Spec::Mocks::Space.new

  RestClient.put @@db, { }

  # Lucene
  file = File.new("couch/_design/lucene.json")
  lucene_view = file.read

  RestClient.put "#{@@db}/_design/lucene",
    lucene_view,
    :content_type => 'application/json'

  # Meals
  file = File.new("couch/_design/meals.json")
  meals_view = file.read

  RestClient.put "#{@@db}/_design/meals",
    meals_view,
    :content_type => 'application/json'

  # Recipes
  file = File.new("couch/_design/recipes.json")
  recipes_view = file.read

  RestClient.put "#{@@db}/_design/recipes",
    recipes_view,
    :content_type => 'application/json'
end

Hmm... lotsa duplication in there. All I need to do is, for each JSON file, create a similarly named design document in the CouchDB view. Thinking of it that way, the Before block gets even smaller:

Before do
  # For mocking & stubbing in Cucumber
  $rspec_mocks ||= Spec::Mocks::Space.new

  RestClient.put @@db, { }

  Dir.glob("couch/_design/*.json").each do |filename|
    document_name = File.basename(filename, ".json")
    file = File.new(filename)
    json = file.read

    RestClient.put "#{@@db}/_design/#{document_name}",
      json,
      :content_type => 'application/json'
  end
end

I really wish that I had done something like this sooner. That feels much better.

I am in pretty good shape now for being able to reload those design documents after wiping my development database. I see an opportunity to go a little bit farther and possibly make some of those design documents test-able. I do not know if I want to go that far at this point, so I will stop here for the day and give it some more thought.