Tuples here, there and everywhere

As I am trying to make some progress on the authorization module, I find that the required databases are getting more and more complex and with them the record structure, meaning that tuple pattern matching is quickly becoming a logistical nightmare, stuff like {_,_,_,_,Variable,_,_,_,_,_,_,_,_,_,_,_,_} = Some_tuple is not very practical. Erlang has a native record definition, but it has some important restrictions, so I had to create a record structure for KVS2, that can correctly create, modify and read records in KVS2 by naming the fields, for this you need to create a list entry on the 2 DB structure tables. After that, you can simply call kvs2:crtrecord(DB,Key,Data), where DB is the table & table structure, Key is the record name and Data is a list of tuples of {field_name, Value}, you can read with getrecord(DB, Key, [Fields]) and modify an entry with updrecord(DB,Key,Data), which works similar to crtrecord, you only need to specify the fields that will be modified. This greatly simplifies data management and allows to change the database format in the future, too. You can also use this functionality to manage any kind of tuple with crttuple & updtuple. This should provide some more flexibility than native Erlang to manage structured tuples. With this addition KVS2 can now handle Key-Value pairs with structured value tuples.

This tuple management and the magical pattern matching will make authorizations ... almost ... a breeze.

BTW, for those of you who can already employ version R13, note that there is a new function called: erlang:make_tuple(Arity, Default, InitList) which can create tuples with initial values, very nice addition, unfortunately Ubuntu has no support for R13 yet (unless I compile manually , yuk!), well, you can't have everything I guess.

Soon more on the Chat Authorization Module (CAM).

Cheers,

Sunweaver