Specify which parts of library to compile or not

Questions / Help
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1

I’m going to try to build a library (that I can hopefully publish) that allows access to statistics reports from the Swedish Statistics Authority. Basically they have a bunch of statistics data but the issue is they use very weird API:s for accessing them so I wanna provide a more easy way to get the data by wrapping the api:s in a nice library.

However they have a lot of reports and data so I will probably have to write a module per report. And it seems a bit wasteful to include all (I’m not sure how many reports in total they got but wouldn’t be surprised if it is over 500) for a project that just wanna access how the population size of each municipality.

I get that it might be hard/impossible to “tree-shake” since code can be called dynamically at runtime but can I provide a way to for example specify in the config which reports they want to actually use? Something like this:

config :scb_ex,
  reports: [:municipality_population]
2

I guess you could hack it by slightly changing your approach.
Instead of a single mix project, you can have a single umbrella project and your modules will become small libraries.
You can control what has access to what with Boundary — boundary v0.10.3 to provide a meaningful error when one “module/report” depends on another that is not compiled (strongly advised against it).
Or you can extract these common pieces to the Core which is exposed to all Reports.

1 Like
3

There was just a post on the Dashbit blog arguing for smaller SDK surfaces:

Are the many reports different enough to need different code?

6 Likes
4

Yea, at least if I wanna wrap it in a nicer way than it is now. I will see if I end up doing that or just providing a slightly improved API. Each report got its own url and then you query it with json. But the filter options are different on each report so the very least I would need to provide different query schemas for each report.

{
  "query": [
    {
      "code": "Region",
      "selection": {
        "filter": "vs:RegionLän07",
        "values": [
          "21",
          "22",
          "23"
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "code": "Organisation",
      "selection": {
        "filter": "item",
        "values": [
          "30"
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "code": "Tid",
      "selection": {
        "filter": "item",
        "values": [
          "2011"
        ]
      }
    }
  ],
  "response": {
    "format": "px"
  }
}