How to use enumerations in Anorm's RowParser

Today I was writing up a bit of code involving anorm, and needed to add in an Enum type. So I looked around at the scaladoc a little bit and found that the get method of the SqlParser object takes an implicit extractor of type Column[T]. So I went ahead and looked at the documentation for Column. I didn't find much hints to creating your own in the trait itself, but in the companion object I did find all the pre-defined extractors of anorm itself. One in particular caught my eye,
the columnToUUID value of the object.

Since UUID is an Enum, I figure'd I could easily lift and modify the code for that to do what I needed for my other types. The source for the it looks like this:

implicit val columnToUUID: Column[UUID] = nonNull { (value, meta) =>
    val MetaDataItem(qualified, nullable, clazz) = meta
    value match {
      case d: UUID => Right(d)
      case s: String => Try { UUID.fromString(s) } match {
        case TrySuccess(v) => Right(v)
        case Failure(ex) => Left(TypeDoesNotMatch(s"Cannot convert $value: ${value.asInstanceOf[AnyRef].getClass} to UUID for column $qualified"))
      }
      case _ => Left(TypeDoesNotMatch(s"Cannot convert $value: ${value.asInstanceOf[AnyRef].getClass} to UUID for column $qualified"))
    }
  }

Which is fairly easy to understand. nonNull is a helper defined in the Column's companion object which handles throwing an error if the field is null when you didn't expect it to be, otherwise it executes the partial function you're providing it. This function simply takes Any and MetaDataItem. The MetaDataItem provides information about the column up for conversion and allows you to provide an error message that's useful later on.

Looking at the code, it's pretty similar to what you might expect. Internally anorm uses Left and Right for parsing as well as scala's util.Success and util.Failure (Note here that TrySuccess is a type alias for util.Success because anorm has it's own success class). The only thing you really need to change here is the type parameter to Column and how you convert a String into it. Scala Enumeration's come with a withName method that you can use where UUID.fromString is called.

So if you had an enumeration in scala defined like so:

object MyEnum extends Enumeration {
	type MyAlias = Value
	val foo = Value("foo")
	val bar = Value("bar")
}

Then a parser for it would look like this:

implicit val columnToMyEnum: Column[MyEnum.MyAlias] = nonNull { (value, meta) =>
    val MetaDataItem(qualified, nullable, clazz) = meta
    value match {
      case d: MyEnum.MyAlias => Right(d)
      case s: String => Try { MyEnum.withName(s) } match {
        case TrySuccess(v) => Right(v)
        case Failure(ex) => Left(TypeDoesNotMatch(s"Cannot convert $value: ${value.asInstanceOf[AnyRef].getClass} to MyEnum.MyAlias for column $qualified"))
      }
      case _ => Left(TypeDoesNotMatch(s"Cannot convert $value: ${value.asInstanceOf[AnyRef].getClass} to MyEnum.MyAlias for column $qualified"))
    }
  }

Which is pretty straightforward to use in a RowParser by calling get with your enumeration's type and having the custom Column in scope. This will implicitly call your defined val:

implicit val columnToMyEnum = ...
...
val myRowParser = RowParser[Thing] {
  ...
  get[MyEnum.MyAlias]("mycolumnname") ~ 
  ...
}

And you're off to the races. Now, since the code is so similar, it begs the question: Can we make defining arbitrary Column's for subtypes of Enumeration take less boilerplate? The answer is yes:

object EnumColumn {
  def for[E <: Enumeration](enum: E): Column[E#Value] = {
    Column.nonNull { (value, meta) =>
      val MetaDataItem(qualified, nullable, clazz) = meta
      value match {
        case d: E#Value => Right(d)
        case s: String => Try { enum.withName(s) } match {
          case scala.util.Success(v) => Right(v)
          case Failure(ex) => Left(TypeDoesNotMatch(
            s"Cannot convert $value: ${value.asInstanceOf[AnyRef].getClass} to ${enum.getClass} for column $qualified"
          ))
        }
        case _ => Left(TypeDoesNotMatch(s"Cannot convert $value: ${value.asInstanceOf[AnyRef].getClass} to ${enum.getClass} for column $qualified"))
      }
    }
  }
}

To use this, we need to pass the object extending Enumeration to our for method, like so:

implicit val enumColumnExtractor = EnumColumn.for(MyEnum)

We've now reduced a lot of boilerplates and we just have to pass our object to our helper method and we're good to go. Sadly, because the enumeration types are nested values we're not going to get much nicer than this, because nested types can't be made without a reference to their parent class, or in this case, object. Still, reducing having to write the amount of code for each Enumeration is valuable.