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Product typeBook
Published inJan 2016
Reading LevelIntermediate
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ISBN-139781785281372
Edition1st Edition
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Pascal Bugnion
Pascal Bugnion
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Pascal Bugnion

Pascal Bugnion is a data engineer at the ASI, a consultancy offering bespoke data science services. Previously, he was the head of data engineering at SCL Elections. He holds a PhD in computational physics from Cambridge University. Besides Scala, Pascal is a keen Python developer. He has contributed to NumPy, matplotlib and IPython. He also maintains scikit-monaco, an open source library for Monte Carlo integration. He currently lives in London, UK.
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Custom type serialization


So far, we have only tried to serialize and deserialize simple types. What if we wanted to decode the language field in the repository array to an enumeration rather than a string? We might, for instance, define the following enumeration:

scala> object Language extends Enumeration {
  val Scala, Java, JavaScript = Value
}
defined object Language

Casbah lets us define custom serializers tied to a specific Scala type: we can inform Casbah that whenever it encounters an instance of the Language.Value type in a DBObject, the instance should be passed through a custom transformer that will convert it to, for instance, a string, before writing it to the database.

To define a custom serializer, we need to define a class that extends the Transformer trait. This trait exposes a single method, transform(o:AnyRef):AnyRef. Let's define a LanguageTransformer trait that transforms from Language.Value to String:

scala> import org.bson.{BSON, Transformer}
import org.bson...
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Scala for Data Science
Published in: Jan 2016Publisher: ISBN-13: 9781785281372

Author (1)

author image
Pascal Bugnion

Pascal Bugnion is a data engineer at the ASI, a consultancy offering bespoke data science services. Previously, he was the head of data engineering at SCL Elections. He holds a PhD in computational physics from Cambridge University. Besides Scala, Pascal is a keen Python developer. He has contributed to NumPy, matplotlib and IPython. He also maintains scikit-monaco, an open source library for Monte Carlo integration. He currently lives in London, UK.
Read more about Pascal Bugnion