As you might already see it on the Clojure ML, I just released Pinpointer, a clojure.spec error reporter similar to Expound, Inspectable, etc https://github.com/athos/Pinpointer

Pinpointer formats (and even colorizes!) spec errors in a human-readable way. The difference between Expound and Pinpointer is very subtle from the outside perspective, but Pinpointer is based on a systematic error analysis rather than heuristic approaches, and this makes it possible to report more complicated errors, such that s/conformer would transform part of the input value.

Have a look at it if you're interested, and any feedback is welcome 😉

@athos I tried pinpointer and it gave up on my complex error, it just used explain as a fallback. Under what circumstances does it do that?

Thank you for giving a try to Pinpointer, @stathissideris! 😆 By default, Pinpointer falls back to s/explain if something bad happens during the error analysis. That mechanism exists to prevent Pinpointer itself from ruining the original spec error info.

If you would like to turn off the fallback behavior, call pinpoint with the option {:fallback-on-error false} like (pinpoint <spec> <input> {:fallback-on-error false})

ok 🙂 in my case I have a pretty loose spec that describes a DSL, so if an expression is wrong, the errors include a lot or different options

because the actual error is one of many things that can go wrong

alright, I’ll try again with this option and see what happens

thanks!

can pinpointer/expound/etc… handle exceptions with spec errors in them?

or would I need to hook into the REPLs exception printer?

In a re-frame CLJS app, my app-db holds entries created by multiple parts of my system. I want to check total validity at start of each re-frame event. So, I have (s/def ::db (s/merge :ns1/db-keys :ns2/db-keys ,,,)) in a central db.cljs file and I validate it in each event. Most of these parts are small and can be reasonably each held by a single file holding its specs, subs, and events. But, this creates a problem. The events need to require the namespace of the merged spec, while that namespace needs the namespaces of each part. What is the cleanest way to tastefully break this namespace circularity?

Ok… partly wanting this for exceptions integrant raises from pre-init-spec… but it looks like integrant actually calls s/explain-out to generate the message in the exception so it does indeed work

What is the recommended approach for shared specs in several projects? One solution is to make the spec a separate project and then require it.

But I am not completely happy with that idea

why not?

I suspect it is the best solution, but I am worried about code reloading and such. -- I will just have to try it out

@andreas862 don’t forget about the leiningen checkouts setting (if that’s what you’re using)

it allows you to hack on multiple non-deployed projects in parallel

@stathissideris ah, that is a nice feature!

🙂 @andreas862 https://github.com/technomancy/leiningen/blob/master/doc/TUTORIAL.md#checkout-dependencies

Perhaps I should save my future self a lot of time and read the documentation...

Thank you

for putting a spec on a def'd var, is the standard way to have a fspec on a self-invoking function?

is there some other way?

not sure I understand what "putting a spec on a def'd var" means. I'm guessing the answer isn't just "use fdef"?

or do you mean a var that's defined to be something other than a function? if so then specing it isn't supported

or... isn't useful

yea, like a var that's bound to the result of a function

yeah you can't spec that

e.g., (def ^:private keys-validators (events-schema->keys-validators events-schema))

or

(def ^:private refinements
  (merge user-defined-refinements normalized-base-refinements))

spec is meant for validating ranges of possibilities, a def'd var is "permanent" in clojure land. but yeah putting your right hand side inside a function and then fdefing that would make the most sense to me

mm, ok. i'll try that. i think last time i tried it couldn't get it to work with anonymous functions (and wasn't really excited about polluting the global namespace with another defn)

do you know if it is possible to fspec an anonymous function?

I mean seeing as this is all only happening once you could just do (def foo (s/assert ::spec (your code here)))

hmm, except that it would probably need a doto so that the result is returned?

assert returns the result if the result was valid

oh, ok

yea, that works. thx!

no worries

How does one do or in spec, I've tried googling

(s/explain (s/or :k1 (s/coll-of ::ar ::ar)
                 :k2 (s/coll-of ::ar ::kr)) [(AudioSignal. 1) (ControlSignal. 1)])

s/tuple?

probably want to look at the regex specs (cat * + ? alt)

ok, will look there. Lot to take in when first stepping into spec 🙂

if I read what you want to do there for example you could say (s/cat :x ::ar :y (s/alt :a ::ar :k ::kr))

cat defines a sequence?

to match sequential collections that start with ar and then have ar or kr. x, y, a, and k are all made up keys that affect the conformed result

anything sequential

seq, vector, list

ok nice, this is actually for the input parameters so it's importent, I'm tempted to do this check at the very beginning of my functions.

they are most commonly used in s/fdef to spec args to functions

so that is a good match

yes I may end up doing that, it's just this instrument function that I'm skeptical of, but I should not be. I want immediate error in runtime on wrong spec, or no matching patterns of a provided arguments, it's kinda pattern matching, therefore looking at or

s/assert might be useful too

On extra question since I'm rambling, is there a way to have any effect on the error message In: [1] val: #object[csound.core.ControlSignal] fails spec: :csound.core/ar at: [:k1 :0] predicate: audio-signal? I'm in clojurescript and I know that the object has keys which could help the user locate his problem, as this could be within a nested ast.