Making builder code look like output code

One of the big challenges with updating Drupal Code Builder for Drupal 8 has been the sheer variety of code to be output. On earlier versions of Drupal, it was just about hooks, and all that needed to be done was to take the API documentation code and replace 'hook_' with the module name. There were info files too, and Drupal 7 added the placing of hooks into different .inc files, but compared to this, Drupal 8 has things like plugin annotations, fluent method calls for content entity baseFieldDefinitions(), FormAPI arrays, not to mention PHP class methods, and more.

But one of the things I enjoy about working on DCB is that I am free to experiment with different ideas, much more so than with work on core or even contrib. It is its own system, without any need to work with what a framework supplies, and it has no need to be extensible. So I can try a new way of doing things as often as I want, and clean up when I've had time to figure out which way works best.

For example, up until recently, the code for a field definition in baseFieldDefinitions() was getting generated in three different ways.

First, the old-fashioned way of doing it line by line, then concatenating the array with a "\n" to make the final code. This is the way most of the old code in DCB was done, but with things that need handling of terminal commas or semicolons, and nesting indents and so on, it was starting to get really clunky.

So then I tried writing something loosely inspired by Drupal's RenderAPI. Because that's a nice big hammer that seems to fit a lot of nails: make a big array of data, chuck your stuff into it, then hand it over to something that makes the output. Except, not so good. Writing the code to make the right sort of array was fiddly. The array of data needed to combine actual data and metadata (such as the class of an annotation), which added levels to the nesting.

Then I hit on an idea: baseFieldDefinitions() fields are a fluent interface, like this:

$fields['changed'] = BaseFieldDefinition::create('changed')
  ->setLabel(t('Changed'))
  ->setDescription(t('The time that the node was last edited.'))
  ->setRevisionable(TRUE)
  ->setTranslatable(TRUE);

What if the code that builds this could be the same, to the point where you could just copy-paste code from, say, the node entity class, and make a few tweaks? Creating the code in DCB would be much simpler, and having the DCB code look like the output code would make debugging easier too.

Using a class with the magic __call() method lets us have just that: a renderer object that treats a method call as some information about code to render. Here's what the builder code for the base field definition code looks like now:

$changed_field_calls = new FluentMethodCall;
$changed_field_calls
  ->setLabel(FluentMethodCall::t('Changed'))
  ->setDescription(FluentMethodCall::t('The time that the entity was last edited.'));
if ($use_revisionable) {
  $changed_field_calls->setRevisionable(TRUE);
}
if ($use_translatable) {
  $changed_field_calls->setTranslatable(TRUE);
}
$method_body = array_merge($method_body, $changed_field_calls->getCodeLines());

It's not yet perfect, as the first line isn't done by this, and the handling of the t() calls could do with some polish; probably by creating a separate class called something like FunctionCall, such that FunctionCall::somefunction() returns the code for a call to somefunction().

But the efficiency and elegance of this approach has led me to devise a new principle for DCB: builder code should look as much as possible like that code that it outputs.

So applying this approach to outputting annotations, the code now looks like this:

$annotation = ClassAnnotation::ContentEntityType([
  'id' => 'cat',
  'label' => ClassAnnotation::Translation("Cat"),
  'label_count' => ClassAnnotation::PluralTranslation([
    'singular' => "@count content item",
    'plural' => "@count content items",
  ]),
]);
$annotation_lines = $annotation->render();

Magic methods used there as well, this time for static calls. The similarity to the output code isn't as good, as annotations aren't PHP code, but it's still close enough that you can copy the code you want to output, make a few simple changes, and you have the builder code.

This work has embodied another principle that I've come to follow: complexity and ugliness should be pushed down, hidden, and encapsulated. Here, the ClassAnnotation and FluentMethodCall have to do fiddly stuff like quoting string values, recurse into nested arrays. They have to handle special cases, like the last line of a fluent call has a semicolon and the last line of an annotation has no comma. All of that is hidden from the code that uses them. That can get on with doing the interesting bits.