NBI Types Package: Aliases & Mapping Signatures Guide

by Alex Johnson 54 views

In this comprehensive guide, we will explore the process of creating an nbi/types package, focusing on defining type aliases and mapping function signatures. This package serves as a crucial layer for wrapping generated types and facilitating seamless data transformation within your application. Let's dive into the specifics and understand how to build a robust and maintainable nbi/types package.

Understanding the NBI Types Package

The nbi/types package acts as an intermediary between your application's internal data structures and external data representations. It encapsulates the generated types from external sources, such as Aalyria in this case, and provides a set of mapping functions to convert between these external types and your application's internal models. This approach offers several advantages:

  • Abstraction: It shields your application's core logic from direct dependencies on external type definitions.
  • Flexibility: It allows you to evolve your internal data models independently of external type changes.
  • Maintainability: It centralizes the mapping logic, making it easier to manage and update.

Step 1: Setting Up the Package

To begin, we need to create a new package within our project structure. The suggested locations are internal/nbi/types or pkg/nbi/types. The choice between these depends on the intended visibility of the package. If the package is meant to be used only within your application, internal/nbi/types is the preferred choice, as it enforces encapsulation. If the package is intended to be a public API for other modules or applications, pkg/nbi/types is more appropriate.

Create the directory structure for your chosen location and add a new Go file, typically named types.go, to house the package definitions.

package types

// This package defines type aliases and mapping function signatures
// for NBI entities.

Step 2: Importing Relevant Packages

Next, we need to import the necessary Aalyria generated packages. These packages contain the type definitions for the external data structures we'll be working with. Identify the specific packages that define the types you need for your NBI entities and import them into your types.go file.

For example, if the Aalyria generated types are located in a package named aalyria, you would add the following import statement:

import (
	"aalyria"
)

Ensure that you have the correct import path for the Aalyria generated packages, as this is crucial for the code to compile correctly.

Step 3: Defining Type Aliases

Type aliases are a key feature of the nbi/types package. They provide shorter, more descriptive names for the Aalyria generated types, making your code more readable and maintainable. In this step, we'll define type aliases for the five key NBI entities: PlatformDefinition, NetworkNode, NetworkInterface, NetworkLink, and ServiceRequest.

For each entity, create a type alias using the following syntax:

type PlatformDefinition = aalyria.PlatformDefinition

Repeat this process for the remaining entities:

type NetworkNode = aalyria.NetworkNode
type NetworkInterface = aalyria.NetworkInterface
type NetworkLink = aalyria.NetworkLink // or BidirectionalLink
type ServiceRequest = aalyria.ServiceRequest

By defining these type aliases, you can now refer to these entities using the shorter, more convenient names within your code.

Step 4: Declaring Mapping Function Signatures

Mapping functions are the heart of the nbi/types package. They are responsible for converting between the Aalyria generated types and your application's internal data models. In this step, we'll declare the signatures for these mapping functions. We'll define functions to convert from Aalyria types to internal types (FromProto) and vice versa (ToProto).

For each NBI entity, declare a pair of mapping functions. For example, for PlatformDefinition, you would declare the following signatures:

func PlatformFromProto(proto *aalyria.PlatformDefinition) (*PlatformDefinition, error) {
	panic("TODO: Implement PlatformFromProto")
}

func PlatformToProto(platform *PlatformDefinition) (*aalyria.PlatformDefinition, error) {
	panic("TODO: Implement PlatformToProto")
}

Note that we're using `panic(