Database.Persist.Class.PersistField

This class teaches Persistent how to take a custom type and marshal it to and from a PersistValue, allowing it to be stored in a database.

Examples

Simple Newtype

You can use newtype to add more type safety/readability to a basis type like ByteString. In these cases, just derive PersistField and PersistFieldSql:

{-# LANGUAGE GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving #-}

newtype HashedPassword = HashedPassword ByteString
  deriving (Eq, Show, PersistField, PersistFieldSql)

Smart Constructor Newtype

In this example, we create a PersistField instance for a newtype following the "Smart Constructor" pattern.

{-# LANGUAGE GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving #-}
import qualified Data.Text as T
import qualified Data.Char as C

-- | An American Social Security Number
newtype SSN = SSN Text
 deriving (Eq, Show, PersistFieldSql)

mkSSN :: Text -> Either Text SSN
mkSSN t = if (T.length t == 9) && (T.all C.isDigit t)
 then Right $ SSN t
 else Left $ "Invalid SSN: " <> t

instance PersistField SSN where
  toPersistValue (SSN t) = PersistText t
  fromPersistValue (PersistText t) = mkSSN t
  -- Handle cases where the database does not give us PersistText
  fromPersistValue x = Left $ "File.hs: When trying to deserialize an SSN: expected PersistText, received: " <> T.pack (show x)

Tips:

• This file contain dozens of PersistField instances you can look at for examples.

• Typically custom PersistField instances will only accept a single PersistValue constructor in fromPersistValue.

• Internal PersistField instances accept a wide variety of PersistValues to accomodate e.g. storing booleans as integers, booleans or strings.

• If you're making a custom instance and using a SQL database, you'll also need PersistFieldSql to specify the type of the database column.

FIXME Add documentation to that.

Prior to persistent-2.11.0, we provided an instance of PersistField for the Natural type. This was in error, because Natural represents an infinite value, and databases don't have reasonable types for this.

The instance for Natural used the Int64 underlying type, which will cause underflow and overflow errors. This type has the exact same code in the instances, and will work seamlessly.

A more appropriate type for this is the Word series of types from Data.Word. These have a bounded size, are guaranteed to be non-negative, and are quite efficient for the database to store.