[Haskell-cafe] Is it possible to get the selector functions when defining a generic class?

[Chris Kahn]

Aaaand you'll get mine twice since I forgot to reply-all the first time :)

Sure, so in postgresql-simple there are two classes for automatically
generating functions that encode/decode database rows, `FromRow` and
`ToRow`. In the Hasql library--another postgres library--the encoders
and decoders must be written by hand for each user-defined type. I want
to write a class that will automatically generate these.

I successfully wrote a `FromRow` class that can generate Hasql's `Row`
type, since it's basically identical to what's in postgresql-simple's
`FromRow`. But in Hasql the encoder type, Params, is contravariant and
encoders are defined like:

    personEncoder :: Params Person
    personEncoder = contramap name (value text) <>
                    contramap age (value int)

The `value text` part can be determined based on the type information,
but it's also expecting a matching selector function. I'm at a total
loss for how I could generate something like this.



On 11/23/2016 10:06 PM, David Feuer wrote:
> Sorry if anyone gets this twice; the first copy somehow went to a
> non-existent Google Groups version of haskell-cafe.
> 
> GHC.Generics doesn't offer any built-in support for such things. It
> *looks* like there *might* be some support in packages built around
> generics-sop. When you're working directly with GHC.Generics, the
> notion of a record barely even makes sense. A record is seen as simply
> a possibly-nested product. For example, ('a','b','c') will look
> *approximately* like 'a' :*: ('b'  :*: 'c'). You're generally not
> "supposed" to care how large a record you may be dealing with, let
> alone what field names it has. May I ask what you're actually trying
> to do? Your specific request sounds peculiarly un-generic.
> 
> On Wed, Nov 23, 2016 at 9:52 PM,  <chris at kahn.pro> wrote:
>> Hey all!
>>
>> I'm trying to understand what's going on in GHC.Generics and defining a
>> generic class... I understand that there's a `Selector` class and `selName`
>> function that can get the name of a selector, but is there a way to access
>> the selector function itself? The documentation conveniently avoids examples
>> involving records and is otherwise quite barren.
>>
>> So if I have a data type like...
>>
>> data Person = Person
>>     { name :: String
>>     , age :: Int
>>     } deriving Generic
>>
>> instance MyTypeClass Person
>>
>> I want my generic implementation of MyTypeClass to be able to access each
>> selector function in the record, f :: Person -> String, g :: Person -> Int,
>> etc.
>>
>> Chris
>>
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