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Jesse Phillips
Jesse Phillips

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Hobby Project: Save Dev Articles

I was able to put together a basic save of dev articles. The main focus here is defining what the data storage will look like, and it still isn't final.

https://gitlab.com/jessephillips/devarticlator/compare/v0.0.2...v0.0.3

Since the intent is to allow article creation, the stored data should match what creation wants. However the data is pulled in with a different structure specification. This has resulted in me defining three structures and a need to transition between them.

Interestingly this has some relevance to an improvement proposal I'm working on.


auto structureArticles(Range)(Range articles) if (isInputRange!Range
                                            && is(ElementType!Range == ArticleMe)) {
    return articles.map!(x => Article(ArticleMeta(x), x.body_markdown));
}
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Since I want to keep meta data separate, I want to extract the markdown body but keep it with the meta data.

With this defined internal representation I can turn to using it to write out the data.

void saveArticles(Range)(Range articles, string folder) if(is(ElementType!Range == Article))
in(folder.exists, "Create direcorty before calling to save articles.")
{
    void saveArticle(Article article) {
        import std.file;
        import std.path;

        auto filename = article.meta.title;
        assert(isValidFilename(filename), "Article Name Conflicts with valid file name.");

        write(folder.buildPath(filename.setExtension("md")), article.content);
        write(folder.buildPath(filename.setExtension("json")), article.meta.serializeToPrettyJson);
    }

    articles.each!saveArticle;
}
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I broke this up into two methods, the outer method is just applying the inner method to each article. A lambda could have been used, I just felt this had a little more structure.

I decided for this first attempt I would just use the article title for the file name. This will be a big issue for Windows, so sanitizing will be needed.

in(folder.exists, "Create direcorty before calling to save articles.")
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This method is not going to manage folders, so I'm setting an expectation the directory will already exist.


I did build this out by first writing the method signature then a unittest. I removed the test for writing the files because it was not testing anything and I hate filesystem dependency.

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