F#-style Type Providers in the Racket language

A Type Provider is a construct to aid programmers that are working with large and/or changing datasets, especially those with no explicit type/shape definition such as an XML DTD.

Type Providers integrate with IDEs such as Visual Studio or Dr. Racket to give autocompletion hints when a developers is trying to access part of this data. Additionally, the functions to get, create, or mutate pieces of this data are checked at compile-time for validity. Finally, the compile-time bindings to functions need to be available at runtime, even if the data used at runtime has different contents than the data used while editing.

In short the features of Type Providers are:

• Compile-time checking of data manipulation.
• IDE Autocompletion of names of data elements/fields.
• The ability to get the shape of data while editing code, and automatically adjust to the similarly-shaped contents of a different data source.

The default Racket package management should be used to install the info.rkt file.

After that, due to lame limitations that I totally should fix, you will need to save any XML files you wish to use to your /Racket folder OR use an absolute path name when specifying the edit-time path within the macro call.

This is a tricky question to answer. An exact answer can be gleaned from the publicly available source code, but the following may help with basic understanding. As with much of this documentation, the example Type Provider used is the XML Type Provider.

The user supplies an edit-time data source to a macro. This is used to infer the type of the data by parsing the XML structure, gathering the names of elements, the names of their fields, and building structs out of them. This edit-time information fuels the autocomplete, and supplies the expansion of the macro as well.

The edit-time data is thus used by the macro in a normal macro-expansion sense, but is also read by the IDE which performs some of the same work as the macro, but does it without actually expanding any macros. The IDE can now tell the user what names of XML data (and their fields) are available with the prefix the user started writing.

The macro, once expanded, will make available a compile-time table of structs behind the scenes. This helps Dr. Racket's background compilation recognize the XML data as structs as sure as if you manually defined each of them yourself. An additional contribution made at compile-time is the generation of a populate-at-runtime function.

A user might not want the program to operate on the same data that they used for edit-time. Perhaps the data that would be useful to work with is updated every 15 minutes on some remote server. In this case, the user can supply the path to a potentially different set of data for use by the program at run-time. So long as the shape does not vary too severely from data supplied at edit-time, the Type Provider will be able to accommodate this run-time data without any need to revise the program every 15 minutes.

Racket may seem like a strange choice to implement a Type Provider for. In fact, in this language the term is a bit of a misnomer. While F# is able to give you compile-time checking of types because it is an inherently typed language,

On the other hand, Racket can only give you the shape of the data. Knowing the shape of your data means knowing which names are accessible from within which object. Coupled with autocompletion, this is still useful. (One pending feature of this project is to give hints to the probable types of fields based on the edit-time data.)

An example on how to use the Type Provider is available in the xml-type-provider-use.rkt file. This will still require you to copy the .txt file it references to /Racket or modify it to use an absolute path.

Please feel free to contribute to this project via forking this repo as with most Open Source Software. I will setup better guidelines as this project continues to develop.