Dreamstate Coding: June 2018

Using domain objects in actions

The first actions that I used basically had me create the domain objects on the outside and then plug them into the create action. The store only took the object and placed it in the stores Map over objects.

type AddUser = { ActionId: Guid; User : User }
type UserStore =
 {
  Users: Map<UserId, User>
 }
 member this.AddUser (action:AddUser)=
  { this with Users = this.Users.Add(action.User.Id, action.User); }

 member this.HandleAction (action:obj) =
  match action with
  | :? AddUser as a -> this.AddUser a
  | _ -> this

This makes your domain model a part of the persistence layer (as all actions are persisted). I.e. you cannot change your model without getting nifty errors (like null exceptions)
You might think that: You still persist snapshots of the whole ApplicationState, i.e. the User object ends up in persistence.
True. But when you do 'model breaking changes', you could just remove all snapshots and then rerun all actions from the start and get the equivalent state as you did before the breaking change. If you in turn include the domain object in the actions, you are screwed.
A better way to write this would be:

type AddUser = { ActionId: Guid; UserId : UserId; Name:string; Email:string }
type UserStore =
 {
  Users: Map<UserId, User>
 }
 member this.AddUser (action:AddUser)=
  let user = 
   {
    Id = action.UserId
    Name = action.Name
    Email = action.Name
   }
  { this with Users = this.Users.Add(user.Id, user); }

Creating identifiers in stores

When creating a new object in a store based on an action, at times I forget and do thing like this:

member this.AddUser (action:AddUser)=
 let user = 
  {
   Id = UserId (Guid.NewGuid())
   Name = action.Name
   Email = action.Name
  }
 { this with Users = this.Users.Add(user.Id, user); }

The end result works the first time. But if you restart the service and Replay actions, then you will end up with a different Identifier for the User object in this case. All actions that want to use this object and refer to it by its Identifier, will not find a match after a replay. Not a good thing
A better way to write this would be:

type AddUser = { ActionId: Guid; UserId : UserId; Name:string; Email:string }
type UserStore =
 {
  Users: Map<UserId, User>
 }
 member this.AddUser (action:AddUser)=
  let user = 
   {
    Id = action.UserId
    Name = action.Name
    Email = action.Name
   }
  { this with Users = this.Users.Add(user.Id, user); }

This way, when we want to create a new user, the code that creates the AddUser action (maybe your ASP.NET Core MVC Controller, needs to generate the Id, but in turn the Id will be persisted with the action and will be the same even after a replay

Assuming that things exist in the store

Not all things are eternal. So just because there is an action arriving that thinks that there exists an object in the store does not mean that there actually is one. Another action could have removed it between that the first action was created and processed.

member this.ModifyUser (action:ModifyUser)=
    let original = this.Users.[action.UserId]
    let updated = { original with Name = action.Name; Email = action.Email }
    { this with Users = this.Users.Add(updated.Id, updated); }

The code above would throw an KeyNotFoundException if the key doesn't exist in the Map.
A better way to write this would be to try to find the object.

member this.ModifyUser (action:ModifyUser)=
 let o = this.Users.TryFind action.UserId
 match o with
 | None -> this
 | Some original ->
  let updated = { original with Name = action.Name; Email = action.Email }
  { this with Users = this.Users.Add(updated.Id, updated); }

Here we use the Map.TryFind function that returns None or Some x. If the key doesn't exist and we receive None, we jut return the current state as the new state.
If we got an hit, the Some original case would be hit and we can plug in the original code there.

Is it an event or a query?

I'm writing a game... Is each frame a new event that recalculates all positions of game objects... In the first version that was the case.

type ShipUpdateCoordinates =  { ActionId: Guid; Timestamp:DateTime; ShipId: ShipId; NewPosition:Vector3; }

Turns out that in 60 fps, there will be a lot of events persisted.

So. Instead of updating the position of each object in 60 fps. Then only event that is persisted is based on user input (or when the game engine decides to change the direction of an NPC object)

type ShipFlyTo =  { ActionId: Guid; Timestamp:DateTime; ShipId: ShipId; Origin:Vector3; Target:Vector3; }

The rendering engine will query

type TravelPlan =
 {
  Origin : Vector3
  Target : Vector3
  SpeedMetersPerSecond : float
  TravelStarted : DateTime
 }
 member this.Distance () = this.Origin.distance this.Target
 member this.TravelTimeSeconds () = 
  match this.SpeedMetersPerSecond with
  | 0. -> 0.
  | _ -> this.Distance() / this.SpeedMetersPerSecond
 member this.Eta () = 
  match this.TravelTimeSeconds() with
  | 0. -> DateTime.UtcNow
  | a -> this.TravelStarted.AddSeconds(a)

 member this.GetCoordinates (now:DateTime) =
  let eta = this.Eta()
  let percentage = PercentageOfValueBetweenMinAndMax (float this.TravelStarted.Ticks) (float eta.Ticks) (float now.Ticks)
  this.Origin.lerp this.Target (percentage/100.)

I.e. we know then the event occurred and what time it is now. That way we can calculate the current position of the object based on its speed and assuming it is traveling at constant speed by using linear interpolation (lerp)
The rendering engine can query the model as many times per second as it wants without having to store the new coordinates. As the ApplicationState is immutable and lock-free, we can do this without affecting event processing.

First time start?

I wanted to generate a game world on the first time start. I tried to use the processed events counter. Turns out as all processing is running on a different thread (as a MailboxProcessor), there is a race condition. And sometimes we just generate 2 worlds.. Not a good thing
Hence I updated the AppHolder class

let mutable private hasReplayed : bool = false;
let IsFirstTimeUse() = not hasReplayed

let private HandleReplayAction (action:obj, id:Guid) =
 hasReplayed <- true
 Processor.Post (Replay action)

This way, in my Program.cs that handles the startup I can just write this to ensure that the game world is generated on the first use.

AppHolder.InitiateFromLastSnapshot();
if (AppHolder.IsFirstTimeUse())
 GameBasicDataCreator.CreateOnFirstTimeStart();

When do I start the Game engine

A similar question, but took me too long to figure out it even happened.

AppHolder.InitiateFromLastSnapshot();
if (AppHolder.IsFirstTimeUse())
 GameBasicDataCreator.Create();
_engine.Start();

Here, we start the game engine when there is a race condition that Replay events are still being processed on another thread. The game engine will start analyzing the game state and reacting to things it see. I.e. not a good thing

Another change was needed in the AppHolder to fix this

let mutable private replayCompleted : bool = false;
let IsReplayCompleted() = replayCompleted
type Message =
 | Snapshot of AppliationState
 | Replay of obj
 | ReplayCompleted
 | Action of obj

For starters we add new public function so that we can query if the Replay is completed. We also add a new internal Message union case ReplayCompleted.

let private Processor = MailboxProcessor.Start(fun inbox ->
 let rec loop (s : AppliationState, c : int) =
  async {
   let! message = inbox.Receive()
   let c' = c + 1
   let s' =
    match message with
    | Snapshot snapshot -> snapshot
    | Replay a -> s.HandleAction a
    | ReplayCompleted ->
     replayCompleted <- true
     s
    | Action a -> 
     AppPersister.Persist a s c'
     s.HandleAction a
   state <- s'
   counter <- c'
   return! loop (s', c')
   }
 loop (AppliationState.Default, 0))

Next we change our MailboxProcessor code to include the handling for the new union case. We just set the mutable value to true from false.

let InitiateFromLastSnapshot () =
 let (snapshot, actions) = AppPersister.GetLatestSnapshotAndActions()
 match snapshot with
 | Some x -> Processor.Post (Snapshot x)
 | _ -> ()
 Array.map (fun x -> (HandleReplayAction x)) actions |> ignore
 if hasReplayed then Processor.Post ReplayCompleted
 
let InitiateFromActionsOnly () =
 AppPersister.GetAllActions()
 |> Array.map (fun x -> (HandleReplayAction x))
 |> ignore
 if hasReplayed then Processor.Post ReplayCompleted

And lastly, we change our 2 initialize functions to send in the ReplayCompleted message to the MailboxProcessor if there were any Replayed actions at all
In our initialization code in Program.cs we can now add some extra checks if there was any replaying done so that we actually wait for them all to be completed before continuing

AppHolder.InitiateFromLastSnapshot();
if (!AppHolder.IsFirstTimeUse())
{
 while (!AppHolder.IsReplayCompleted())
  Thread.Sleep(100);
}

That is it!
AppHolder updates have been uploaded to github.

All code provided as-is. This is copied from my own code-base, May need some additional programming to work. Use for whatever you want, how you want! If you find this helpful, please leave a comment or share a link, not required but appreciated! :)

Hope this helps someone out there!

type ShipId = Guid
type Ship = 
 {
  Id : ShipId
  Name : string
 }
let ship = { Id : Guid.NewGuid(); Name : "Nebuchadnezzar" }

Turns out this was not the best way to do things. From C# code you can just send in any Guid, nothing is typed. And you can assign a 'ShipId' to a 'UserId' in F# as well, as it is just a type alias. I found out that a hard way while tracking down a bug that turned out to be a copy paste issue.

So, now that I have a bunch of stuff already written, I had to change this to a single item discriminated union. Took a while but it seems to work much better with the type-safety.. The way I thought that I thought it already did.

So, lets redefine the ShipId as a single item discriminated union like

type ShipId = ShipId of Guid

The code to use it from code is like:

let ship = { Id : ShipId (Guid.NewGuid()); Name : "Nebuchadnezzar" }

Usage from C#

My game is partially written in C# as it just works better for some tasks. So interfacing with the new typed ids will be like:

Getting the underlying Guid

var shipIdGuid = ship.Id.Item,

Creating a new ShipId from a Guid

var shipId = ShipId.NewShipId(Guid.NewGuid());

So a little bit more hassle from C#, but not that much, and most of my code is just service layer code creating F# records from external input. And the little extra overhead is worth it for the type-safety!

All code provided as-is. This is copied from my own code-base, May need some additional programming to work. Use for whatever you want, how you want! If you find this helpful, please leave a comment or share a link on social media, not required but appreciated! :)

Hope this helps someone out there!
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Dreamstate Coding

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Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Functional Adventures in F# - Event sourcing lessons learned