What confuses me is that in the docs, nothing is quoted. when querying with the map form. https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/query/query-executing.html It also shows the nested query map form for a /q and not /query invocation, which also confuses me, as i thought /q wanted a flat map and args as & args , supplied directly to the function

I don't think you want to quote the args, right?

(d/query {:query '{:find [?e]
                   :in [$ ?title]
                   :where [[?e :title ?title]]}
          :args [(d/db conn) "negroni"]})

No, I guess not, but how do I only quote the query-map? This is the interface to the database, where parse-strainer takes a map of user input and builds a query-map through a cond-> pipeline

(defn strain [strainer]
  (let [query (parse-strainer strainer)]
    (d/query query)))

The purpose of quoting is so symbols like ?e don’t get expanded to current.ns/?e and lists like (some-rule) in the query don’t get evaluated.

you can accomplish the same clause by clause, or using forms like (list 'some-rule '?foo ?bar) or even ('some-rule '?foo ~'?bar)`

This is normal Clojure quoting, it’s not specific to datomic

the query just wants to see literal symbols ?e etc

yeah ok, that makes sense of course, I guess I don’t quote that much in Clojure otherwise.

But what I still don’t get is how they want to to use the api. If I have a fn that spits out the following map so that it might then be used to call d/query with, how do I quote only the :query submap?

{:query {:find [?e]
                   :in [$ ?title]
                   :where [[?e :title ?title]]}
          :args [(d/db conn) "negroni"]}

if you already have the query map, why are you quoting it again?

im not! which is where I get confused, haha

(defn strain [strainer]
  (let [query (parse-strainer strainer)]
    (d/query query)))

is my end-point

if that is actually what your function returns, then you are done

just hand that map to d/q

my fn

(defn- parse-strainer [{:keys [:ingredients :search :type]}]
  (cond-> base-query
    ingredients (simple-query :ingredients '?ingredients ingredients)
    type (simple-query :type '?type type)
    search (fn-query :fulltext '?fulltext 'fulltext '$ search)))

{:query
 {:find [(pull ?e [:id :title])],
  :in [$ [?ingredients ...] [?fulltext ...]],
  :where
  [[?e :ingredients ?ingredients]
   [(fulltext $ :fulltext ?fulltext) [[?e ?n]]]]},
 :args [(d/db @*conn) ["vodka" "cream"] ["russian"]]}

but when i do (strain {:ingredients ["vodka" "cream"] :search ["russian"]}) i get Execution error (UnsupportedOperationException) at datomic.datalog/extrel-coll$fn (datalog.clj:300). nth not supported on this type: Symbol

where do your args come from?

your (d/db @*conn) is a literal list with d/db and conn elements

I think it’s trying to use it as a vector-type datasource, but d/db doesn’t support nth

oh shoot, so i should somewhere do like (def db (d/db conn) and have :arg [db [“foo”] [“bar”]?

“arg” is not syntax, it is real objects

(d/q query arg1 arg2) and (d/q {:query query :args [arg1 arg2]}) are equivalent

can you show the code that builds args?

ah, of course! I did not think of that at all

“its just data”

(defn strain [strainer]
  (let [{:keys [query args]} (parse-strainer strainer)]
    (apply d/q query (d/db @*conn) args)))

you can still do that, just don’t quote the args in your base map

the problem is that the db was literally a list, instead of the db object, so some quoting was going on that shouldn’t have.

i get that now, thank you so much for your help!

i guess i just assumed that i would be invoked somewhere along the line, don’t think i’ve encountered this before

datomic is the only place outside of macros where i’ve actually come across quoting

is there a best prefered way to pass the db argument around? in my cases, I’ve used (d/db @*conn) where conn is an atom holding a (d/connect uri), would it be “better” if it was just a var with a (d/db conn)?

https://docs.datomic.com/on-prem/best-practices.html#consistent-db-value-for-unit-of-work

like any code, avoid mutables

conn is a mutable

db is not

also, it allows some priviledge scoping: anyone can transact with a conn, but not with a db

that makes sense, thanks!

I guess i should just RT rest of the FM, that best practice page was really good!

do you have any good open source reference projects that use datomic that one could look at?

I know lots of libraries, but I can’t think of any apps offhand

no probs, I’m super thankful for all the help already! : )

Can I have one last quoting question? In my query, I want to pull and bind-coll with …, which i can add to my q no problems,

{:query
 {:find
  [(pull ?e [:id :title :recipe :preparation :ingredients]) ...],
  :in [$ [?ingredients ...] [?fulltext ...]],
  :where
  [[?e :ingredients ?ingredients]
   [(fulltext $ :fulltext ?fulltext) [[?e ?n]]]]},
 :args [#{"gin" "rum"} #{"russian"}]}

Does it have something to do with the fact the the other invocations of … are nested? should not, right?

This is a peer vs client api difference. Only the former supports destructuring in :find

Hm, then that’s strange, I thought that Datomic free only used the peer api? It works in my hand written queries, which is what made me confused

You are using free not cloud?

D/q with map arg is a client api thing, so I assumed you were using cloud

Haha, no, I’m a free leecher for the moment. d/q takes args in map or vector form, d/query take maps with :query and :args keys, as Ive understood it. I have no clue about how the client api, have not researched that yet

Nvm, this is the map form of query, so you need an extra vector

[:find a b c] => {:find [a b c]}. So [:find [a ...]] => {:find [[a ...]]}

In the past I’ve placed start calls at the beginning of each HTTP request, right before handing the request to the app handler. Calls to start are idempotent and are essentially no-ops if things are already started.

@UNRDXKBNY so it’s basically side-effecting middleware.

This gives you a well-defined place to assoc the started system onto the request map as well.

Hm, I haven’t needed stop hooks myself. I wonder if you could tie into the Simple Workflow (SWF) hooks that Datomic sets up for coordinating deploys.

Ooh, didn't know about that part of Datomic (thanks for the pointer!), though it makes sense that something like SWF was behind coordinating deploys. I wonder if there's some buried api for this that wasn't too much trouble/not supported to hook into