Writing your own translator

A translator is the piece of code responsible for translating a list of pipelines steps into anything you see fit. For instance, this packages comes with mongo36 and mongo40 translators that translates a list of pipeline steps into the list of corresponding mongo instructions.

You could imagine writing your own translator to output SQL code or pandas code or just a plain human-readable text, etc. We call each of this output type a “backend”, that is a symbolic name for the kind of output your translator produce. It has no specific meaning but we would advise to keep it lowercase, short, readable and self-explanatory.

To define your own translator, you need to:

  1. create a translator class extending the default lib/translators/base:BaseTranslator class

  2. implement a transformation method for each pipeline step your backend supports

  3. write tests for your backend

  4. register your backend so that is it available

Creating a translator class

All pipeline steps are defined in the lib/steps using typescript interfaces. Each step type defines at least a name property which is required to be unique among all possible step types. A generic PipelineStep type is defined as being the union type of all available step types.

Your translator class will have to extend the lib/translators/base:BaseTranslator class and provide a transformation method for each supported step type. The method name has to match exactly the name of step type. It should accept a step parameter with the corresponding type and return whatever you need.

For instance, suppose that you want to support the rename and filter step only, your translator module might look like:

import { BaseTranslator } from '@/lib/translators/base';
import type { RenameStep, FilterStep } from '@/lib/steps';

class MyTranslator extends BaseTranslator {
  rename(step: RenameStep) {
    return 'rename!';
  }
  filter(step: FilterStep) {
    return 'filter!';
  }
}

…and that’s it. The BaseTranslator class will provide additional facilities:

  • a supportedSteps property that will return the list of steps supported by your backend. In our example case, it will return ['filter', 'rename']

  • an unsupportedSteps property which is the dual operation and will return the list of all unsupported steps

  • a translate method which accepts an array of pipeline steps and return an array of whatever your transformation methods return. The default implementation is to iterate over all steps in the pipeline, call the corresponding transformation method and append the result to an output list. Of course, if you want something more clever, you can override the default implementation.

Registering your translator

Use the registerTranslator helper:

import { registerTranslator } from '@/lib/translators';

class MyTranslator extends BaseTranslator {
  // implementation…
}

registerTranslator('my-backend', MyTranslator);

and make sure your module is imported somewhere so that registerTranslator gets called.

Getting a translator

Most of the time, you’ll know which backend you want to get a translator for. In this case, you’ll just have to use the getTranslator method:

import { getTranslator } from '@/lib/translators';

const myTranslator = getTranslator('my-backend');
const outputSteps = myTranslator.translate(
  { name: 'domain', domain: 'my-domain' },
  { name: 'rename', oldname: 'old', newname: 'new' },
  { name: 'rename', oldname: 'old2', newname: 'new2' },
);

Querying the registry

Sometimes, you’ll just want to get some information on available backends or all backends supporting a specific operation:

import { availableTranslators, backendsSupporting } from '@/lib/translators';

for (const [backend, translator] of Object.entries(availableTranslators)) {
  console.log(`backend ${backend} supports t${translator.supportedSteps}`);
}

Or, to get the list of backends supporting the ‘rename’ operation:

const backends = backendsSupporting('rename');
console.log(`${backends} supports the "rename" operation`);