Defining Your Own Types¶

Lasso is an object-oriented language and comes with many built-in types. In fact, we’ve been using the date type to get the current hour in our ongoing example as well as integer, string, array, and map types. Lasso also gives programmers the ability to write their own custom types.

Let’s look at the current version of our ongoing example:

<?lasso
   local(time_info) = map(
      `morning`   = map('greeting'="Good Morning!",   'bgcolor'='lightyellow'),
      `afternoon` = map('greeting'="Good Afternoon!", 'bgcolor'='lightblue'),
      `evening`   = map('greeting'="Good Evening!",   'bgcolor'='lightgray')
   )
   local(time_of_day) = #time_info->find(time_of_day)
?>
<html>
   <body style="background-color: [#time_of_day->find('bgcolor')]">
      [#time_of_day->find('greeting')] I am an HTML document.
   </body>
</html>

We have encapsulated the logic of determining whether it is morning, afternoon, or evening into the method time_of_day, so now we can easily use that logic anywhere, and, if need be, we can easily change the logic by editing the code in one place. However, the greeting and background color associated with the time of day are only on this page. What if we want to be able to have the correct greeting and background color for the time of day wherever we are. We could copy the “time_info” map everywhere we want it, but then we’re making the code hard to change in the future. This is where a type would be handy.

Using a Custom Type¶

We want the time of day to have more properties than just whether it is morning, afternoon, or evening: we now want it to also have a greeting and a background color. Below is an example of creating a custom type to fulfill this requirement as well as an updated version of our page to use this custom type:

Custom type in LassoStartup

define time_of_day => type {
   data public hour::integer

   data private time_info = map(
      `morning`   = map('greeting'="Good Morning!",   'bgcolor'='lightyellow'),
      `afternoon` = map('greeting'="Good Afternoon!", 'bgcolor'='lightblue'),
      `evening`   = map('greeting'="Good Evening!",   'bgcolor'='lightgray')
   )

   public onCreate(datetime::date=date) => .onCreate(datetime->hour)
   public onCreate(hour::integer) => {
      .'hour' = #hour
   }

   public greeting => {
      return .'time_info'->find(.asString)->find('greeting')
   }

   public bgColor => .'time_info'->find(.asString)->find('bgcolor')

   public asString => {
      if(.hour >= 5 and .hour < 12) => {
         return 'morning'
      else(.hour >= 12 && .hour < 17)
         return 'afternoon'
      else
         return 'evening'
      }
   }
}

Web page markup

<?lasso
   local(time_of_day) = time_of_day
?>
<html>
   <body style="background-color: [#time_of_day->bgcolor]">
      [#time_of_day->greeting] I am an HTML document.
   </body>
</html>

Once again, the code for the page will be in a file in the server’s web root, but the code for the type should be in a file residing in “LassoStartup” of the Lasso instance’s home directory and having a name ending with “.lasso” or “.inc”.

Code Walkthrough¶

The code starts with the define keyword followed by the name of the custom type we are defining, then the association operator (=>), the type keyword to specify this is a type definition, and then an open brace. This line of code to the matching closing brace at the end is known as the “type definition”. This opening line tells Lasso that we are defining a type named “time_of_day”.

There are two basic components in a type definition: data members and methods (sometimes called “member methods” as they are members of the type).

The code above defines two data members: “hour” and “time_info”. This is done using the data keyword, an optional access level keyword (public, private, or protected), and then the name for the data member. Notice that the “hour” data member has a type constraint specifying that only integer values can be stored in it. Also notice that I use the assignment operator (=) to assign a starting value to “time_info”.

The access level keywords are used to specify who has access to retrieve and store data in the data member through getter and setter methods respectively. (A “getter method” is simply the term we use for a method that returns the value stored in a data member, and a “setter method” is the term that refers to a method that sets the value of a data member to a given value.) Public data members have getter and setter methods that can be called in any context. Private data members have getter and setter methods that can only be called within the type’s own member methods. The getter and setter methods for protected data members can only be called by the type’s member methods and by member methods of any types that inherit from this type. (Type inheritance is beyond the scope of this tutorial.)

Next come the member method definitions. These are exactly like standard method definitions, but instead of starting with the define keyword, they start with one of the access level keywords (public, private, protected). Just like with data members, this specifies where these methods can be called. (In our example, all the member methods are public and may therefore be called from anywhere.)

First, we use multiple dispatch to create two time_of_day->onCreate methods which mirror the two methods we created in the methods tutorial. The first one may look unusual as it doesn’t have any braces. They are unnecessary if the method can be written in a single expression whose value you want to return. The code above is equivalent to writing:

public onCreate(datetime::date=date) => {
   return .onCreate(datetime->hour)
}

The “onCreate” method is a special method for types. They define type creator methods that are used to create instances of your type (also called “objects”). With the time_of_day->onCreate methods above, we have defined two different type creator methods, one that can be called like this:

time_of_day       // No parameters
time_of_day(date) // Any date object as a parameter

And one that can be called with an integer:

time_of_day(14)   // Any integer parameter for the hour

Note that since a type creator method is always called to create the object, we could have put the code setting the map for “time_info” inside the “onCreate” method. Also note that it is best practice to have one “onCreate” method that does all the setup work that all the other “onCreate” methods call. (Don’t repeat yourself!)

Next are the methods for getting the greeting and the background color; they simply use the map in the item_info data member to return the correct value. As the initial key into the map, they use the value returned by the time_of_day->asString method.

The time_of_day->asString method contains the logic for determining if the hour is morning, afternoon, or evening. We named the method “asString” because that method name has special significance for Lasso. Lasso implicitly calls this method if a statement contains nothing but an object or type creator method. For example:

time_of_day(15)
// => afternoon

If we did not define our own “asString” method, the default is to just return the name of the type, so the above example would return “time_of_day” instead of “afternoon”.

The code on the page starts by instantiating a time_of_day object with the current time into a local variable named “time_of_day”. It then uses this object to get the correct background color and greeting on the page by calling the corresponding member methods using the target operator (->) followed by the name of the method.

The result is that we now have a custom type we can use on any page to get the time of day as well as the appropriate greeting and background color for that time of day.