GAMEON

Hands-on experiment building microservices and cloud native applications

NoSQL persistance with Cloudant

Where we learn about Persistence via Cloudant.

Overview

This adventure will take you through the basics of Persistence from a Microservice perspective, using Cloudant as your backing database. You will add simple usage of Cloudant to a Game On room, and will learn about configuring a Cloudant service instance, communicating with it, and how you might use this further within a room.

Why Cloudant ?

There are many options for persistence in a microservices architecture, including nosql db’s, graph db’s, and regular sql db’s. In this walkthrough we’ll just be looking at one, Cloudant. Cloudant describes itself as:

"…​a fully-managed database service built to scale globally, run non-stop, and handle flexible schemas for rapid development. Just PUT JSON in and GET JSON out."

It has a REST based interface and uses JSON as its records. Which makes for nice, simple integration with most microservice projects, although remember that just because we’re choosing Cloudant for this Room service, it doesn’t mean all of your services have to!

Being able to store documents in this manner isn’t just something you might want for a room, the Game On Player service, and the Map service both use Cloudant to persist their data.

We’ll extend the Java Sample Room, to add a way for users in the room to select items from a vending machine, and have the room modify /examine to show the item the user has equipped. We’ll store the selection for a player in Cloudant, and query the stored data to handle the /examine command for a player.

Prerequisites

This walkthrough starts after having completed the Java Sample Room.

It requires a Cloudant service for your room to talk to, you can acquire one for free in Bluemix by;

  1. Signing into the Bluemix web console.
  2. Select Services from the "Hamburger" Menu. (or cheat, and use the link in the next step.)
  3. Click the Catalog link to go to the view of available services in Bluemix.
  4. Search for, or navigate to Cloudant NoSQL DB
  5. Goto the Cloudant service page, scroll down, and ensure you select the 'Lite' (Free) tier.

  6. In the Connect to: drop down on the left, find and select your Java Sample Room.
  7. Give the Service name/Credential name something meaningful that you’ll recognise later.
  8. Hit the 'Create' button at the bottom right.

Congratulations, you’ve created a Cloudant instance that we’ll use in the rest of this walkthrough.

Walkthrough

Pom.xml updates to add the Cloudant client.

Firstly, edit the pom.xml in your room project and find the <dependencies>…​</dependencies> block. Add this dependency after the existing ones, just before the </dependencies> tag.

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.cloudant</groupId>
    <artifactId>cloudant-client</artifactId>
    <version>2.8.0</version>
</dependency>

This will allow us to use the Cloudant client library within our Room code.

Parsing VCAP_SERVICES to obtain the service details.

When our Room is running as a CF App in Bluemix, we’ll be supplied the details for our Cloudant instance as part of the environment variable VCAP_SERVICES. This happens because we attached the service to our Java Room app in step 6 in the Prerequisites section.

To retrieve the service details we need to parse the JSON supplied in this environment var, and extract the Cloudant specific information.

As documented over on the 'Getting started with Cloudant' page, the JSON will have structure like this:

{
    "cloudantNoSQLDB": {
        "name": "Cloudant-3s",
        "label": "cloudantNoSQLDB",
        "plan": "shared",
        "credentials": {
            "username": "someusername",
            "password": "secret",
            "host": "myhost-bluemix.cloudant.com",
            "port": 443,
            "url": "https://someusername:secret@myhost-bluemix.cloudant.com"
        }
    }
}

Lets start by processing that using the javax.json package. In the RoomImplementation class, add the following code to the postConstruct method.

  String vcapServicesEnv = System.getenv("VCAP_SERVICES");
  if (vcapServicesEnv == null) {
      throw new RuntimeException("VCAP_SERVICES was not set, are we running in Bluemix?");
  }
  JsonObject vcapServices = Json.createReader(
                              new StringReader(vcapServicesEnv)).readObject();
  JsonArray serviceObjectArray = vcapServices.getJsonArray("cloudantNoSQLDB");
  JsonObject serviceObject = serviceObjectArray.getJsonObject(0);
  JsonObject credentials = serviceObject.getJsonObject("credentials");
  String username = credentials.getJsonString("username").getString();
  String password = credentials.getJsonString("password").getString();
  String url = credentials.getJsonString("url").getString();

That will read the JSON, and dive down to obtain the credentials, and then the username, password, and url we need.

Connecting to the database

Once we have the credentials, and URL, we need to create a CloudantClient that will let us talk to the service.

CloudantClient client = ClientBuilder.url(new URL(url))
            .username(username)
            .password(password)
            .build();

From the CloudantClient we can obtain a Database object that lets us talk to our database managed by our Cloudant Service. First declare the db object as a class variable so we can refer to it later.

Add this to RoomImplementation near where roomDescription is defined.

private Database db;

Then initialise it within the postConstruct method after your have built the CloudandClient.

db = client.database("Shoes",true);

This will obtain the database called Shoes, and if it doesn’t exist, it will create it. That’s great, because at this point we know it doesn’t exist yet, but once it does, we can keep using the same code to obtain it regardless.

Creating a simple item selection machine in Game On.

We take a quick twisty road away from persistence for a moment, because we need something to persist.

Lets create ourselves an imaginary machine that the player can use to pick a pair of shoes. To keep this walkthrough brief, we’ll limit the machine to existing via custom commands, but if you follow the 'Adding items to your room' tutorial, you could easily make it into a real Game On room item.

First we’ll add some shoes for our machine to stock.. in the RoomImplementation class, add a class variable declaration like this:

final static String shoes[][] = {
   {"Red Stilettos", "a beautiful pair of red stiletto heels."},
   {"Pink GoGo Boots", "a shockingly high platformed pair of gogo boots."},
   {"Green Strappy Sandals", "a curious combination seemingly held together by"+
                             " many tiny buckles."},
   {"Blue Wedge Heels", "a deep blue pair of very high wedge heels."},
   {"Black Oxfords", "a dull boring pair of oxfords, with a 5 inch heel."}
};

We’ll use the primary index to know which pair we are talking about, and the secondary to obtain details about the shoes. We’ll try to keep the descriptions so that we can add them to text based on the template "<PlayerName> is wearing".

Find the processCommand method in the RoomImplementation class. It’s main logic is comprised of a switch statement that compares the command the user entered, with the commands the room understands. Add a block to that switch statement that looks like the following:

case "/listshoes" :
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    sb.append("There are the following shoes available;\n");
    for(String[] shoe : shoes){
      sb.append("* \"");
      sb.append(shoe[0]);
      sb.append("\" - \"");
      sb.append(shoe[1]);
      sb.append("\"");
    }
    endpoint.sendMessage(session,
                       Message.createSpecificEvent(userId,
                       sb.toString()));
    break;

Thats enough to allow our users to discover our shoes, And we also want to allow them to equip a pair:

case "/equip" :
  if(remainder == null){
  endpoint.sendMessage(session,
                       Message.createSpecificEvent(userId,
                       "Equip what? maybe try /listshoes, and pick a pair"));
  }
    for(String[] shoe : shoes){
      if(shoe[0].toLowerCase().equals(remainder)){
        endpoint.sendMessage(session,
                             Message.createSpecificEvent(userId,
                             "You are now wearing "+shoe[1]));
  		return;
  	}
  }
  //no match
  endpoint.sendMessage(session,
                       Message.createSpecificEvent(userId,
                       "I couldn't find "+remainder+" to equip."+
                       " Maybe try /listshoes, and pick a pair"));
  break;

Thats enough to allow a player do do /equip red stilettos and have an appropriate response go back. Of course, we know this, but the room user doesn’t yet, we could update our RoomDescription to include information on our new command. Take a look at the Adding items to your room adventure to find out more.

So far, the room is still stateless, although we’ve allowed the user to pick from a list of shoes, and told them they are now wearing them, we forgot we did that as soon as we sent them the message.

Effectively that’s as far as you can get without some sort of persistence. Next we’ll look at saving the choices to the database.

Tracking the equipped item via the database.

Before we can put things into, and get things out of, the database we need to decide on what 'things' are. Cloudant will store JSON objects, and the Cloudant client API we are using will automatically map these to & from Java bean type objects.

First we must create a class representing the data we plan to store and retrieve from the database. We could just store the players userId and an index into the shoes array, but that would be fragile if the array changed and could lead to someone wearing the wrong shoes! Instead, we will store the players userId and the name and description for the shoes they chose. That way if we change the shoes in the machine, they will always get to keep the version they had.

Here’s our example class:

public class PlayerData {
  private String _id;
  private String _rev;
  private String shoeName = null;
  private String shoeDesc = null;

  public PlayerData() {
    shoeName = "";
    shoeDesc = "";
  }

  public String get_id() { return _id;	}
  public void set_id(String _id) { this._id = _id; }

  public String get_rev() {	return _rev;}
  public void set_rev(String _rev) { this._rev = _rev; }

  public String getShoeName() { return shoeName; }
  public void setShoeName(String shoeName) { this.shoeName = shoeName; }

  public String getShoeDesc() { return shoeDesc; }
  public void setShoeDesc(String shoeDesc) { this.shoeDesc = shoeDesc; }

}

The code is pretty much what you’d expect, a class with getters/setters for the Shoe Name & Shoe Description. Notice also the 2 extra fields _id and _rev which form part of how Cloudant remembers the data. We’ll use the _id field with the userId we have for the player.

Now lets edit our /equip method to store/update the choice in the database.

case "/equip" :
  if(remainder == null){
    endpoint.sendMessage(session,
                         Message.createSpecificEvent(userId,
                         "Equip what? maybe try /listshoes, and pick a pair"));
  }
  for(String[] shoe in shoes){
    if(shoe[0].toLowerCase().equals(remainder)){
      endpoint.sendMessage(session,
                           Message.createSpecificEvent(userId,
                           "You are now wearing "+shoe[1]));

      PlayerData pd = new PlayerData();
      pd.set_id(userId);
      pd.setShoeName(shoe[0]);
      pd.setShoeDesc(shoe[1]);
      db.post(pd);

      return;
    }
  }
  //no match
  endpoint.sendMessage(session,
                       Message.createSpecificEvent(userId,
                       "I couldn't find "+remainder+" to equip."+
                       " Maybe try /listshoes, and pick a pair")););
  break;

When a player uses /equip now, we will push the details of their selected shoe choice to the database. Now let’s see about reading it back…​

Querying the db for /examine command

We will update the /examine command so that if a player issues /examine <playername> that we will will return the message <playername> is wearing <shoedesc>. If we have no database entry for the player, we’ll just return a fixed message.

Our first minor problem to solve is that our PlayerData is indexed by player id, but the players in the room will be using usernames to refer to each other. So we need a way to track the username to player id mappings active in our room.

Head up to where roomDescription is declared in RoomImplementation and add a quick HashMap that we’ll use to store that data.

private Map<String,String> nameToId = new ConcurrentHashMap<String,String>();

Locate the handleMessage method of the RoomImplementation class, and just after the userId and username fields have been declared, add:

nameToId.put(username.toLowerCase(),userId);

That will update the map every time we receive a message. We can then track when players leave by adding this to the roomPart and roomGoodbye blocks:

nameToId.remove(username.toLowerCase());

This is almost right, but if a player signs into your room more than once (say from a mobile device and a laptop) then when they leave via any device, you’ll think they left from every device. If you fancy a challenge, solving this isn’t too hard. As a hint, the Player service offers a way to query player location.

Now we have a way to map from player name to player id, we can update our /examine command to allow /examine playername.

Find the /look and /examine case statement in the processCommand method in the RoomImplementation class. Update it to look like this:

case "/look":
case "/examine":
    if ( remainder == null || remainder.contains("room") ) {
        endpoint.sendMessage(session, Message.createLocationMessage(userId, roomDescription));
    } else {
        String targetId = nameToId.get(remainder);
        if(targetId!=null){
            try {
                PlayerData pd = db.find(PlayerData.class,targetId);
                endpoint.sendMessage(session,
                      Message.createSpecificEvent(userId, remainder
                         +" is wearing "+pd.getShoeDesc()));
            } catch (NoDocumentException e) {
                endpoint.sendMessage(session,
                       Message.createSpecificEvent(userId, remainder
                         +" does not seem to be wearing any shoes at the moment."));
            }
        } else {
            endpoint.sendMessage(session,
                Message.createSpecificEvent(userId, LOOK_UNKNOWN));
        }
    }
    break;

Now when a player does /examine fred we’ll check if we know the player id for fred (which we should do, if fred is in our room), and then we’ll look in the database to see if fred has /equip 'd a pair of shoes.

Working example repo

For complete versions of the code discussed so far, check out my Sample Cloudant Room. It does everything described here, showing usage of the Cloudant client API to store and retrieve information.

Suggested extensions

  • Store the item descriptions themselves in the db
  • Use the database to store id’s of users trusted to add items to the vending machine
    • Add commands to allow trusted users to update the machine content
  • Update the db to allow players to own more than 1 pair of shoes
    • Use Cloudant to locate the equipped pair for a player using a filtered query
    • Allow players to trade shoes with each other

Conclusion

You have now learned a little about how to talk to Cloudant, and use it to persist data from your Microservice. Although here the example is just for fun, you can hopefully see how you could apply the same approach for more serious data within a service. For a discussion of how the Game On Map service uses Cloudant, have a look here.

Suggested further adventures.

Consider taking a look at the JSR-107 adventure, it would be interesting to store active items in a Cache, and prepopulate the cache from the db. You could also investigate the JSR-107 Write-through behavior to keep the db up to date with cache changes.

Or maybe take a look at the Adding items to your room adventure, and learn how you could turn the vending machine, and the items the player obtains from it, into proper Game On entities.