Introduction » Overview

ROM encourages a clear separation between your application domain and the data access layer. This is more than just hiding access behind methods. Your application is not coupled to the details of data retrieval or manipulation.

Reading

1. Your application requests data from a Repository
2. Data is read from the Datastore using a Relation provided by an Adapter
3. The result is returned to your application
   • It can be optionally mapped to a different representation using Mappers

Writing

1. Your application calls a Command, either directly or through repository or its changesets, to perform a Create, Update, Delete, or a custom command type
2. The command executes a datastore-specific operation via its relation
3. The result is returned to your application
   • It can be optionally mapped to a different representation using Mappers

Repositories

Repositories provide a powerful CRUD interface built on top of relation, mapping and command APIs. They give you a simple way for composing data provided by relations, automatically map data to struct objects or custom object types, and expose simple access to commands with support for changesets.

Relations

A relation is defined as a set of tuples identified by unique pairs of attributes and their values. In ROM it is an object that responds to #each which yields hashes. It is backed by a dataset object provided by the adapter.

Commands

Commands in ROM are intended to safely modify data. Commands can be used to create, update and delete. They are usually provided by the adapter, but you may define your own.

Mappers

A mapper is an object that takes a relation and maps it into a different representation. Mappers are generated automatically by repositories and in typical cases you don't have to define them; however, ROM provides a DSL to define custom mappings or you can register your own mapper objects for custom, non-standard queries, or complex cross-datastore mappings.

Adapters

ROM uses adapters to connect to different data sources (a database, a csv file - it doesn't matter) and exposes a native CRUD interface to its relations. Every adapter has extension points to support database-specific functionality. It provides its own relation types, extensions for built-in commands, and potentially new command types. Furthermore, an adapter can provide extra features that are needed to work with a given database type. For example, rom-sql provides Migration API.