May 13, 2013

"Good Enough" error handling in Clojure

Writing Clojure is not like writing Java. In Java, exceptions are an accepted part of the workflow; in Clojure, they are begrudgingly supported out of necessity, but generally avoided.

Why is that?

Probably because writing code that throws exceptions makes your functional code a lot less functional – that is, a lot less composable. When you can’t trust a function to execute and return a value you lose some functional purity. And you want functional purity, don’t you?

So what to do when we want to write code that might expect an error to occur? Let’s try out a common scenario: a form validation routine. We want to take an input from a form submission, which we’ll call params, ensure a few things about the input, and, if everything checks out, return the object. If something goes long along the way, we want to print an error message and avoid executing any other steps.

Let’s say we have to perform the following (contrived) validations:

:address is present and not empty
:email contains something that looks like an email address
:phone contains a phone number in the format (555) 555-5555
:state is one of a certain subset of US state codes.

;; Clean up our parameters
(defn clean-contact
  "Accept a map containing email, phone, state, address"
  [params]
  ...
)

First off, since we don’t want to jump out of our function with an exception, we need a way of returning either an error message, or a value. Let’s be pragmatic and do the Dumbest Thing That Could Possibly Work. In this case, a tuple of value and error message does the trick. If there is an error, value is nil and error is a string error message. If no error occurred, the error message is nil.

Let’s write our simplest validator first:

(defn clean-address [params]
  "Ensure (params :address) is present"
  (if (empty? (params :address))
    [nil "Please enter your address"]
    [params nil]))

That’s pretty easy, right? Let’s do a few more:

(defn clean-email [params]
  "Ensure (params :email) matches /\w@\w\.\w/"
  (if (re-find #"\w@\w\.\w" (params :email))
    [params nil]
    [nil "Please enter an email address"]))

(defn clean-phone [params]
  "Ensure phone number matches /\([0-9]{3}\) [0-9]{3}-[0-9]{4}/"
  (if (re-find #"\([0-9]{3}\) [0-9]{3}-[0-9]{4}" (params :phone))
    [params nil]
    [nil "Please enter your phone number in (555) 555-5555 format."]))

(defn clean-state [params]
  "Ensure state is one of OR or WA. Cascadians unite!"
  (case (params :state)
    "WA" [params nil]
    "OR" [params nil]
    [nil "We only want people from Oregon or Washington, for some reason."]))

Ok, we see a pattern here. [params nil] whenever everything is ok, and [nil msg] whenever they’re not.

Now, how to chain these together? Doing it straight-up is a bit ugly, but gets the job done:

(defn clean-contact [params]
  (let [[params err] (clean-email params)
        [params err] (if (nil? err) (clean-address params) [nil err])
        [params err] (if (nil? err) (clean-phone params) [nil err])
        [params err] (if (nil? err) (clean-state params) [nil err])]
    [params err])

If only we had some way of creating some code that could shorten that. Some sort of “function”…

(defn apply-or-error [f [val err]]
  (if (nil? err)
    (f val)
    [nil err]))

Now, our clean-contact function is itself a bit cleaner:

(defn clean-contact [params]
  (let [result (clean-email params)
        result (apply-or-error clean-address result)
        result (apply-or-error clean-phone result)
        result (apply-or-error clean-state result)]
    result))

And we can use threading via ->> to make that a bit better still:

(defn clean-contact [params]
  (->> (clean-email params)
       (apply-or-error clean-address)
       (apply-or-error clean-phone)
       (apply-or-error clean-state)))

Finally, this seems like an excellent place to use a macro to clean things up:

(defmacro err->> [val & fns]
  (let [fns (for [f fns] `(apply-or-error ~f))]
    `(->> [~val nil]
          ~@fns)))

(defn clean-contact [params]
  (err->> params
          clean-email
          clean-address
          clean-phone
          clean-state))

Now, we just have one more change: We can shorten the name of our apply-of-error function by using a more standard terminology:

(defn bind-error [f [val err]]
  (if (nil? err)
    (f val)
    [nil err]))

Does “bind” sound familiar? What we’ve just done is implement a heavy-handed error monad! The unit-error is just (fn [val] [val nil]).

You don’t need to know or care about that to derive value from this example though. It’s just a simple way of handling error code without losing that functional touch.

If you want to see all the code from this article at once, with tests, here’s the gist

If you want to learn how to make a more robust version of this using clojure’s algo.monads library, I recommend this excellent post by Andrew Brehaut.

Adam Bard

Makes Websites

"Good Enough" error handling in Clojure