Better Pipelines with Monadex

September 3, 2015

Before I get started, let me be blunt, this is not another monad tutorial. The world has enough of those already. I’m not going to write about functors and applicatives or other technical theory. This is just a post about how a particular monad made my life better.

The Problem: Network Requests

I’m building a Phoenix app where people can buy something. So, I needed to integrate with my favorite gateway, Stripe, which involves making a series of network requests each time a user makes a purchase.

Specifically, I needed to do these things for each purchase:

  1. Ensure the user hasn’t already purchased the thing.
  2. [Network] Create a Stripe Customer for the user, if it doesn’t exist.
  3. [Network] Create a Stripe Charge for the purchase amount.
  4. Update the database to reflect the fact that the purchase has been made.

If any one of steps 1-3 fail, I don’t want to perform the remaining steps. Instead, the process should fail immediately and return the error.

The Pipeline Operator Isn’t Enough

I started out with a naive solution, using Elixir’s normally adequate pipe operator to tie the steps together:

result = user
         |> assert_not_purchased_yet
         |> create_stripe_customer(stripe_token) # From Stripe.js
         |> create_stripe_charge
         |> update_database

The obvious problem with this is that regardless of the result of each function, the next function will be called. For example, create_stripe_charge/1 will still run even if create_stripe_customer/2 failed.

I can work around this by making each function return either {:ok, state} or {:error, reason}. If a function gets {:error, reason}, it should do nothing, which would have the same result as if it wasn’t called at all.

Here’s how that looks:

def create_stripe_customer({:ok, state}, stripe_token) do
  # Create Stripe customer, return {:ok, state} or {:error, reason}
end
def create_stripe_customer({:error, _} = error, _stripe_token) do
  error # just return the error
end

def create_stripe_charge({:ok, state}) do
  # Create stripe charge, return {:ok, state} or {:error, reason}
end
def create_stripe_charge({:error, _} = error) do
  error
end

This way, if create_stripe_customer/2 returns an error, then create_stripe_charge/1 will do nothing. We can repeat this pattern all the way down the chain, and pipeline will then look something like this:

result = user
         |> assert_not_purchased_yet
         |> create_stripe_customer(stripe_token) # From Stripe.js
         |> create_stripe_charge
         |> update_database

case result do
  {:ok, state}     -> # Display success to user
  {:error, reason} -> # Display error reason to user
end

This works, but it isn’t very elegant. I have to add a new function definition for each function in the pipeline to handle the error case.

Monads to the Rescue!

I knew enough about monads at this point to vaguely understand that they are a bit like pipelines. Maybe there was a kind of monad that could make this better?

It turns out that there is. The excellent Monadex library for Elixir provides just what I needed, the Monad.Result monad. Rather than talk theory, let’s just look at how we use this thing:

defmodule MyApp.Purchase do
  use Monad.Operators # Brings in the ~>> bind operator

  # Import functions from the Monad.Result module.
  # These will be used to wrap the state that we pass through
  # all of our functions.
  import Monad.Result, only: [success?: 1,
                              unwrap!: 1,
                              success: 1,
                              error: 1]

  def create(user, stripe_token) do
    result = success(user) # Wrap user with the "success" monad state
             ~>> fn user -> assert_not_purchased_yet(user) end
             ~>> fn user -> create_stripe_customer(user, stripe_token) end
             ~>> fn user -> create_stripe_charge(user) end
             ~>> fn user -> update_database(user) end

    if success?(result) # %Monad.Result{type: :success, value: user}
      value = unwrap!(result) # Same as result.value
      # Display success to user
    else
      # Display error to user
    end
  end

  # ...
end

First, we use the Monad.Operators module. This brings in the ~>> operator which we’ll get to in a minute. Next, we import most of the functions from Monad.Result.

Underneath the hood, a Monad.Result is just a struct that wraps state, not all that different from a {:ok, state} or {:error, reason} tuple.

%Monad.Result{type: :error | :success, value: state}

So, the first thing we do is wrap our state, the user variable, with a Monad.Result struct. Since this is the first part of our pipeline, we’ll start with a :success struct.

success(user) # => %Monad.Result{type: :success, value: user}

The ~>> operator, when used with the Monad.Result monad, will ensure that the next function in the pipeline only runs if the previous one returned a :success result. Otherwise, it terminates immediately and returns the last Monad.Result that was returned.

If we use a ~>> pipeline instead of the regular |> pipeline, our functions can then look like this:

def assert_not_purchased_yet(user) do
  case purchased?(user) do
    true  -> error("Already purchased.")
    false -> success(user) # Return whatever state the next function needs
  end
end

def create_stripe_customer(%{stripe_customer_id: id} = user) when id != nil do
  success(user) # The user already has a stripe customer id, so do nothing
end
def create_stripe_customer(user, stripe_token) do
  case Stripe.Customer.create(user) do # pseudocode
    {:ok, _customer} -> success(user)
    {:error, reason} -> error(reason)
  end
end

def create_stripe_charge(user) do
  case Stripe.Charge.create(...) do # pseudocode
    {:ok, _charge}   -> success(user)
    {:error, reason} -> error(reason)
  end
end

# etc ...

Much cleaner! Now, we’ll only make the Stripe network calls if the previous step was successful. There’s no nested tree of if statements, just a simple pipeline. And we can operate on the result of all these operations very simply:

if success?(result) do
  # Get the value out of the monad
  value = unwrap!(result)
  # render success
else
  # render error
end

Errors Prevented

This implementation elegantly handles each of the following situations:

  • The user has already purchased the product.
  • The user is already associated with a Stripe customer.
  • The Stripe customer could not be created.
  • The Stripe customer could be created but the charge could not.

Further, it only does as much work as necessary to determine the result. It fails fast, allowing the user to get feedback as soon as possible.

Conclusion

This is the first time I understood how a monad would help me, and I hope it was useful to you too! Whenever you find yourself wishing for a better type of pipeline, give Monadex a try.

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