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LightMongo

LightMongo is a lightweight Mongo object persistence layer for Ruby which makes use of Mongo's features rather than trying to emulate ActiveRecord.

Status

LightMongo is still new, but all the examples below are working. Please check out the integration tests for usage indications, and please post any issues you find to the the Github issues page.

Installation

LightMongo is best installed via gem install light_mongo and required as normal.

It is dependent on the gem mongo, which is the MongoDB Ruby driver. For performance reasons I would recommend also installing mongo_ext, the C extensions for the driver.

Rails

Please see LightMongo-Rails for an ActionPack-compatible bridge.

The problem

Developers occasionally encounter a domain which defies simple modelling in an ActiveRecord relational style, and look to some of the nosql databases for a solution. They find Mongo, a document database, and feel it might provide the flexibility they need. After a bit of research they pick out a persistence library which seems popular and well maintained. It even emulates most of ActiveRecord's behaviour, style and relational philosophy. Great!

Hang on a minute, wasn't it ActiveRecord's behaviour, style and relational philosophy they moved to Mongo to get away from?

The solution

  • Ruby instances store their state in instance variables. Why do we need to hide this in the persistence layer?
  • Ruby has quite the heap of array management operators. Why do we need explicit relationships and relationship proxies?
  • Objects of the same class can perform a number of different roles or be related to other classes in lots of ways. Why do we need to jump through complicated and restrictive hoops to do something we do in pure Ruby domains all the time?

Mongo is a flexible database. We can make use of that flexibility to allow our persistence layer to make decisions on how to best serialise and deserialise our objects. It's our responsibility to make sure our domain is correct. It's the library's responsibility to store those domain objects.

We're Ruby developers. Let's act like it.

An example

require 'rubygems'
require 'light_mongo'

class Article
  include LightMongo::Document
end

geology_article = Article.new(:title => 'Fluid Physics in Geology', :abstract => 'Lorem ipsum dolor..')
geology_article.save

Article.find.first
=> #<Article:0x101647448 @_id="4b93c1e97bc7697187000001" @title="Fluid Physics in Geology" @abstract="Lorem upsum dolor...">

No tables. No database. Save your migrations for when you actually have some data to shift around.

Slightly more complex

Plain Ruby objects stored in your Documents will be serialised along with the Document and embedded in the Mongo document.

class Article
  include LightMongo::Document
  
  attr_accessor :title, :comments
  
  def initialize(*args)
    @comments = []
    super
  end
end

class Comment
  attr_accessor :author_name, :text
end

geology_article = Article.create(:title => 'Fluid Physics in Geology')
comment = Comment.new
comment.author_name = 'Dave'
comment.text = "Cool article!"

geology_article.comments << comment
geology_article.save

first_article = Article.find.first

first_article.title
=> "Fluid Physics in Geology"

first_article.comments
=> [#<Comment:0x101664138 @author_name="Dave" @text="Cool article!">]

Dynamic finders

It's not generally a good idea to do much searching on keys that haven't been indexed (as in most databases), so LightMongo will only set up dynamic finders for attributes you've asked to have indexed. If you really want an unindexed finder, they're not difficult to write.

class Article
  include LightMongo::Document
  attr_reader :page_length
  index :title
  index :abstract, :as => :precis
end

geology_article = Article.create(:title => 'Fluid Physics in Geology',
                                 :abstract => 'A study in geological fluid physics',
                                 :page_length => 367)

Article.find_by_title('Fluid Physics in Geology').first == geology_article
=> true

Article.find_by_precis('A study in geological fluid physics').first == geology_article
=> true

The aliasing option is not required, but is recommended if you want dynamic finders for indexed keys that can't be represented in a standard Ruby method name (for example, a finder will not be created for a complex multi-level Mongo key index. See the Mongo manual for more information).

Cross-collection relationships

LightMongo uses its Document mixin to signify a collection, so if you embed a LightMongo::Document inside another LightMongo::Document, the serialisation engine will consider this a cross-collection relationship and behave accordingly.

class Article
  include LightMongo::Document
  attr_reader :author
end

class Person
  include LightMongo::Document
end

dave = Person.new(:name => 'Dave')
fluid_physics = Article.create(:title => 'Fluid Physics in Geology', :author => dave)

Person.find.first
=> #<Person:0x101664138 @_id="4b93cf9397bc7697187000001" @name="Dave">

Article.find.first.author == Person.find.first
=> true

Future development

  1. Migrations (e.g. when you rename classes or modify their collection style).
  2. Some kind of validations, perhaps.