The Bank Kata in Ocaml - Part 3: injecting a clock with Functors

So at the end of part 2 we said we don’t like that we have to add the date as part of the public API. Which makes sense for a public bank terminal, we do a deposit or withdrawal now.

So we’ll want to remove on from deposit and withdrawal. But where do the dates come from now? Let’s introduce a Clock module:

Let’s see if we can rewrite our test to adapt to this new API

open! Base
open! Stdio

let%expect_test "Printing the statements should contain all transactions" =
  Lib.Account.create ()
  |> Lib.Account.deposit ~amount:1000.0
  |> Lib.Account.deposit ~amount:2000.0
  |> Lib.Account.withdrawal ~amount:500.0
  |> Lib.Account.print;
  [%expect{|
    date || amount || balance
    14/01/2012 || -500.00 || 2500.00
    13/01/2012 || 2000.00 || 3000.00
    10/01/2012 || 1000.00 || 1000.00
  |}]

So how do we get a date in.

Let’s introduce a Clock module that returns a new Date upon calling now ()

module Clock = struct
  let now () = "SystemClock"
end

Well, obviosly, "SystemClock" should be replaced by an actually system clock, but that’s not part of the exercise. So now our Account should use this clock:

let deposit ~amount account = {date = Clock.now (); amount} :: account
let withdrawal ~amount account = {date = Clock.now (); amount = amount *. -1.} :: account

That’s trivial to write, and now our test should run but they are red of course, because we get "SystemClock" as the date. In our tests we don’t want to pass a system clock. We want to have a test clock. So Clock should be a parameter to the Account. Let’s turn our Account into a Functor

This is almost trivial (once you know how to do it). We transform our module into a functor that takes a Module argument of type Clock_S.

module type Clock_S = sig
  val now : unit -> string
end

module Make(Clock: Clock_S) = struct
  (* implementation of the Account here *)
end

What is Clock_S? We can define it as:

module type Clock_S = module type of Clock

I’ve defined this type in a file common.ml and added open Common at the top of account.ml

So it’s basically the type of our clock module. We could have explicitly written it like:

Ok, so we transformed our Account into a Functor. How can we use it now in our tests?

In our test we’ll need to use Account.Make to create a new Account module. To call Make we pass a Module with type Clock_S. Let’s create that module. Ideally, we’ll want to pass some dates into the module that will be used in our Account.

module type TestDates = sig
  val dates : string array
end

module TestClock (D : TestDates) = struct
  let i = ref 0
  let now () =
    let date = D.dates.(!i) in
    i := !i + 1;
    date
end

TestClock is again a functor that takes TestDates, this makes it easy to inject the test dates that we want to use in our test. It keeps a ref i to keep track of how many times it has been called, and returns a different date each time. It’s important to see that this code will crash with an index out of bounds exception when we don’t provide the correct values in our test setup, but that’s ok, even desired for our test.

Now we can change our test like this to make it green again:

let module Account = Lib.Account.Make(TestClock(struct let dates = [|"10/01/2012"; "13/01/2012"; "14/01/2012"|] end)) in

We make a new Account with a TestClock and pass it in the dates that we want.

Our complete test looks like this:

let%expect_test "Printing the statements should contain all transactions" =
  let module Account = Lib.Account.Make(TestClock(struct let dates = [|"10/01/2012"; "13/01/2012"; "14/01/2012"|] end)) in
  Account.create ()
  |> Account.deposit ~amount:1000.0
  |> Account.deposit ~amount:2000.0
  |> Account.withdrawal ~amount:500.0
  |> Account.print;
  [%expect{|
    date || amount || balance
    14/01/2012 || -500.00 || 2500.00
    13/01/2012 || 2000.00 || 3000.00
    10/01/2012 || 1000.00 || 1000.00
  |}]

When we now run our test, they will be green!

We solved our problem of dependency injection with Functors. We could also have injected a function in Account.create with signature unit -> string but by solving it like this we almost had no changes to make to our original code which is a great plus. Furthermore it’s possible to provide a default implementation that we use in our production code like this:

include Make(struct let now () = "SystemClock" end)

Where "SystemClock" is obviously a real system clock. The final code can be found here: https://github.com/tcoopman/bank-kata-ocaml

Conclusion

We’ve used some basic dependency to inject a Clock into our Account, but we have no other complex design at all. If you look at the sample solution of Sandro you’ll see that next to the Clock there is also a StatementPrinter and Transactionsrepository injected. In a real application this would probably be needed, but I don’t find that it adds any value at the moment for this simple kata.

A repository might certainly be needed, but for now, you’re responsible for keeping the state. If I were to implement a full application I’d probably reverts some thing and transfer Account into a pure domain object. I’d remove the clock and add on again to deposit and withdrawal. Also, I’d change the signature of print (and rename it as well), to return a list of statements.

This would give me a pure Account module with all domain logic that I can use in my Application, where I can inject a Clock, Repository and StatementPrinter.