I’m continuing my experiments with Erlang - this time trying out gen_server with a simple key/value store with a twist - the values have an expiration date.

As a first iteration I’m simply using a dictionary to store the values, and only expiring records when they are looked up. My plan is to extend this later on so that this can be a global key/value store across multiple Erlang nodes but for now I’m focusing on two things - get something going using gen_server, and try out the common_test testing framework.

The code is here: https://github.com/snorristurluson/erl-expiring-records

Let’s first take a look at a couple of the test functions, to show the usage of this:

get_non_expired_record(Config) ->
    Pid = ?config(pid, Config),
    Record = {"bingo", "bongo", erlang:system_time(second) + 3600},
    ok = gen_server:call(Pid, {add, Record}),
    {ok, "bongo"} = gen_server:call(Pid, {fetch, "bingo"}).

get_expired_record(Config) ->
    Pid = ?config(pid, Config),
    Record = {"bingo", "bongo", erlang:system_time(second) + 1},
    ok = gen_server:call(Pid, {add, Record}),
    timer:sleep(2000),
    not_found = gen_server:call(Pid, {fetch, "bingo"}).

I should probably wrap the gen_server:call calls to make this more readable - I’m just realizing that now as I write this, but I want this blog to reflect my progress on learning Erlang, rather than just presenting some final result.

Here’s the handle_call:

handle_call(Request, _From, State) ->
    D = State#state.data,
    case Request of
        {add, {Key, Value, ExpiresAt}} ->
            D2 = dict:store(Key, {Value, ExpiresAt}, D),
            {reply, ok, #state{data=D2}};

        {fetch, Key} ->
            case dict:find(Key, D) of
                {ok, {Value, ExpiresAt}} ->
                    Now = erlang:system_time(second),
                    case Now < ExpiresAt of
                        true ->
                            {reply, {ok, Value}, State};
                        _ ->
                            D2 = dict:erase(Key, D),
                            {reply, not_found, #state{data=D2}}
                    end;
                error ->
                    {reply, not_found, State}
            end;


        size ->
            {reply, dict:size(D), State};

        _ ->
            {reply, unknown_command, State}
    end.

Coming from a long background of writing in C++ and Python, the notion of having no object with a state still feels a bit weird. The gen_server process replaces that by passing the state around so it kind of boils down to the same thing. I just have to remember to return the new state when changing the dict.

Tests

I kept running into problems with eunit when trying to set up a fixture for running the various tests, all starting with a fresh instance of the expiring_records server. Looking at Common Test it seemed it might be more suitable so I’ve set up my tests with it this time around. I recommend this section of the Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good tutorial for getting started with Common Test.

Note that Travis CI by default runs eunit when testing Erlang projects - I had to add the following to my .travis.yml file:

script:
    rebar3 ct --suite app_test

What’s next?

This is still very much a work in progress - I want to look at Mnesia for storing the data, rather than a simple dict. I figure that is the easiest way to achieve my goal of having this a global store across multiple nodes.

I also want to add a way to prune expired records without looking them up, to prevent the accumulation of expired records.