From: Dreamcat Four <dreamcat4@...>
Date: 2010-03-10T20:27:58+09:00
Subject: Re: Best / cleanest DSL for manipulating data files?


So i've been looking at the current API interface to my classes. To be 
honest, Ive been playing with examples all morning, but cannot find a 
way to make them user friendly enough. Hopefully at least one person 
here would be kind enough to suggest to me a regular object to 
initializer eg `.new()` with an options hash?

I wonder a lot how people have done this for other kinds of files. A 
while ago I write a gem for manipulating yaml files called `yamldoc` 
which tackled the problem of reading / writing yaml settings files.

http://github.com/dreamcat4/yamldoc

Yamldoc uses a very different approach. So im not saying that its 
necessarily applicable to this problem here. Just maybe another example 
to draw from.

How best to solve a problem like this? Can any of you point to an 
examples from elsewhere in the Ruby world?


These are my attempts so-far. Can't stress enough how im emphatically 
*not at all* happy with them yet. So don't waste your time replying to 
say how bad they are, or whats wrong with them. I already know :)

But hopefully you can get the idea of what its trying to do.


# 1. First attempt (but none of the options)
launchd_plist filename do
  label               "com.github.homebrew.myprogram"
  program_arguments   ["/usr/bin/myprogram"]
  run_at_load         true
  working_directory   "/var/db/myprogram"
  standard_out_path   "/var/log/myprogram.log"

  sockets do
    sock_service_name "netbios-ssn"
  end
  sockets do
    sock_service_name "netbios"
    bonjour ['smb']
  end
end
plist.finalize


# Module to avoid namespace conflicts
include ::Plist4r

# 2. This is not much different to 1 except the 'w' argument
# it doesnt really seem to work for me
p = plist4r("/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.cups.cupsd.plist",'w')
p.keys do
  key1 "value1"
  key2 true
end
p.finalize


# 3. If a plist is just a file then maybe ::File syntax?
::Plist4r.open(plist,'w') do
  key1 "value1"
  key2 true
end

::Plist4r.open(plist,'r') do |hash|
  puts hash.inspect
end

# 4. Like 3 but we are writing a binary plist?
::Plist4r.open(plist,'w', :binary =>true) do
  key1 "value1"
  key2 true
end

# 5. Different again
plist = ::Plist4r.open(plist,'w', :delayed_write => true) do
  key1 "value1"
  key2 true
end

plist.format = :binary # force to binary
plist.finalize # actually reads and writes the plist


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