Re: [Yaml-core] Transfers and Formats

[Steve H. <sh...@ha...>]

You want the user to customize the YAML Store results in two different ways:

    1) You want the user to give you a rearranged view of the object.  For
example, the user might suppress certain fields and calculate others.

Examples:

package Name;

sub YAML_view {
    my ($self) = @_;
    # return scalar for YAML
    return "$self->{first} $self->{middle} $self->{last}"
}

package AddressBook;

sub YAML_view {
    my ($self) = @_;
    # exclude certain items for privacy considerations
    return {
        items => [ sort {$_->{name}} grep { $_->{listing} ne 'private' }
@{$self->{items}} ]
    }
}

    2) You want the user to configure how Store works for nodes.   I think this
is almost always going to happen at the hash level.  For example, if you have an
array, the decision to inline it or not probably depends on the context of the
hash that encloses it.  Also, the most common configuration option will probably
be sort keys for hashes.

package Employee;

sub YAML_hash_configure {
    return YAML::Load(<<END);
    - Name: {QuoteAlways: 1}
    - Salary: {SpecialTransfer: 'http://salary.org'}
    - Responsibilities:
        CompressSeries: 0
        TabularInline: 1  # inlines all elements of array, tries to line up
commas
    # Manager key is omitted
END
}

If you separate the view mechanism from the configure mechanism, I think you
might find a way to back into a YAML-based formatting language.