Google cloud datastore

Overview

A protobuffer backed library for interacting with google cloud datastore and handles connections, authentication and provides a simple framework for interacting with the datastore.

Two methods for interacting with the datastore are offered by the library. In addition to the mirrors based datastore.dart library, which can be used for persistence of regular dart classes, direct access to the datastore protobuffer API (generated using the dart protobuf package) is also available and can be accessed via a DatastoreConnection instance.

Usage

Include the datastore library in your pubspec.yaml file:

dependencies:
  google_cloud_datastore: any

The packages exposes two APIs, the datastore API, which provides a mechanism for defining persistent objects based on standard dart class definitions and provides utility methods for interacting with the datastore. To use this library, import the datastore library from the root of the package

import 'package:google_cloud_datastore/datastore.dart';

A minimal library which provides access to the raw protobuffer API (which is generated directly from the datastore protobuffer API schema) and to the DatastoreConnection instance is avialable vial the datastore.protobuf library.

import 'package:google_cloud_datastore/datastore_protobuf.dart';

Connections

The main connection to the datastore is available via an instance of the DatastoreConnection object. In order to access the datastore from a compute engine, it is assumed that you have enabled the Google Cloud Datastore API using the google developer console and either:

• you are connected to a compute engine instance with the datastore and userinfo.email scopes
• You have a valid service account and associated private key file with which to connect to the datastore instance.
• You can make http requests to an instance of the gcd tool.

Connect from compute engine instance

If connecting to the datastore from an instance of the compute engine, the DatastoreConnection object simply needs to be instantiated using the datasetId of the target datastore.

Future<DatastoreConnection> connection = 
	DatastoreConnection.open(<dataset_id>, projectNumber: <project_number>);

Connect using service account

If connecting to the datastore using a service acount and key file, these can be passed into the constructor by specifying the service account name (the email of the service account) and a private key file (which is obtained by creating an instance of the service account).

The private key file needs to be in a .pem format, which can be obtained from the .p12 file supplied from google using the command

openssl pkcs12 -in <privatekey>.p12 -nocerts \
     -passin pass:notasecret -nodes -out <rsa_private_key>.pem

If asked for the import password, the password will be notasecret.

The datastore can then be instantiated with the details of the service account.

Future<DatastoreConnection> connection = DatastoreConnection.open(
	"<dataset_id>",
	projectNumber: "project_number",
	serviceAccount: "<service_account_email>",
	pathToPrivateKey: "<path_to_private_key>");

Connect to gcd tool

If connecting to a compute engine instance running at a given host, simply provide the datasetId and hostname to the DatastoreConnection instance.

Future<DatastoreConnection> connection =  DatastoreConnection.open(
	<dataset_id>, 		
	host:<gcd_host>);

Key concepts

Datastore

The Datastore negotiates communications over a DatastoreConnection. Providing utility methods for looking up, querying and mutating entities. Creating a Datastore object will automatically scan the local mirror system for kinds during construction.

final Datastore datastore = new Datastore(connection);

Kind

A Kind is a static definition of a datastore persistable object.

A Kind must directly extend Entity and be annotated with the @Kind annotation. The datastore name of the kind can either be provided via the annotation or will be inferred from the name of the class.

A Kind must also provide a generative constructor which forwards to Entity(Key key, [Map<String,dynamic> propertyInits])

eg. The following class declaration a Kind with no properties which can be persisted as a EmptyKind object in the datastore.

@Kind()
class EmptyKind extends Entity {

	@constructKind
	EmptyKind._(Key key): super(key);
}

The Entity constructor also accepts an (optional) map of property names to values, which can be used to provide initial values for entities during object construction.

Abstract Kinds

By default, all Kinds are concrete, which means that they are persisted as a datastore entity. To save duplicating code, it might be advantageous to create a single base kind holding properties applicable to multiple entity kinds.

This can be accomplished in a variety of ways.

• The first option is to not annotate the base kind , eg:

class BaseKind extends Entity {
  BaseKind(Key key): super(key);
  //Properties
}

@Kind()
class Subkind extends BaseKind {

   Subkind(Key key): super(key);
}

In this case, Subkind will inherit all properties of BaseKind and BaseKind can even be an abstract kind, disabling dart instantiation of the type.

• The second option is to create a concrete base kind and abstract subkinds. eg.

@Kind()
class BaseKind extends Entity {
  BaseKind(Key key): super(key);
  //Properties
}

@Kind(concrete: false)
class Subkind extends BaseKind {
  Subkind(Key key): super(key);
}

In this latter case, Subkind will, when persisted to the datastore, be stored as a BaseKind entity, but have an implicit ___subkind property which associates it with the subclass definition.

This can be useful if you want to create multiple different kinds of entities with the same basic structure that can be accessed using the same query, without providing a lot of useless optional fields on BaseKind

For instance, if you had a datastore entity Message and you wanted to create a type of Message that was only visible to certain users, you could do:

@Kind()
class Message extends Entity {
  @Property()
  String content => getProperty('content');
} 

@Kind(concrete: False)
class PrivateMessage extends Message {
  /**
   * All `User`s who can view this message
   */ 
  @Property()
  List<Key> visibleTo => getProperty('visibleTo');
}

NOTE: The use of abstract kinds is limited to the following limitations:

• Exactly one kind in an inheritance heirarchy can have concrete: True.
• Keys and Querys must be instantiated with the name of the concrete parent (so, you would pass Key('BaseKind', ...) into the above constructor).

Entity

An entity represents a persisted instance of a kind from the datastore.

Key

A key is a unique identifier of an entity in the datastore. A key is always bound to a particular kind and may be named (in which case the unique identifier is a user provided String), or unnamed (in which case the identifier is a database assigned int).

NOTE: While named entities can be created directly, unnamed entities (those with an id) need to be allocated in the datastore before they can be used using the datastore.allocateKey method.

A key is analagous to a file system path and represents a path from the root of the datastore to the location of the entity. An entity can own other entities, and queries within this group are guaranteed by the datastore to be strongly consistent.

Property

Every Entity is built from multiple Propertys, which represent the data stored on the Entity. Properties can be any of the following dart types:

• int
• double
• num*
• String
• DateTime
• Key
• Uint8List**
• dynamic - A value of any of the above types.

Or a List of any of the above types.

* num values are stored as a doubleValue in the datastore.
** stored as a blobValue on the datastore entity. Note that a property typed as List<int> is to be a List of intValue, whereas Uint8List is stored as a blobValue.

eg.

@Kind()
class MyKind extends Entity {
  /**
   * Get a new instance of `MyKind` with `propertyOne`
   * initialised to the provided value
   */
  MyKind(Datastore datastore, Key key, {propertyOne: "hello"}): 
    super(datastore, key, {"propertyOne" : propertyOne});
	
  /**
   * A `final` String property with name `"propertyOne"` which is stored as a `String` value
   */
  @Property()
  String get propertyOne => getProperty("propertyOne");
	
  /**
   * A mutable `int` property with name `"property_two"` which is stored
   */
  @Property(name: "property_two", type: PropertyType.INTEGER)
  dynamic get propertyTwo => get_property("property_two");
  set propertyTwo(dynamic value) => set_property("property_two");
}

Examples

Connecting to the datastore

The canonical example provided for datastore connections is the example/adams.dart file.

A similar example demonstrating usage of the protobuf API is available as example/adams_protobuf.dart.

Testing

Running the unit tests requires an instance of the gcd tool installed on the machine.

1. Create an instance of the tool using

   bash gcd.sh create --datset_id='test-id

2. Start the gcd server running on localhost port 5961 in testing mode.

   bash gcd.sh start --port=5961 --testing ~/.gcd

3. Run the unit tests in dart checked mode

   dart -c test/all_tests.dart