Introducing Malleable Models

As part of our ongoing work on the Kadense Framework, we've added in the capability to make Malleable Models and Converters using custom resource definitions.

So what are Malleable Models? Well these models allow you to define dynamic data types. It works in a similar fashion to the custom resource definitions themselves in Kubernetes. You essentially create a data model in yaml or json and upload it into the Kubernetes control plane:

apiVersion: kadense.io/v1
kind: MalleableModule
metadata:
  name: test-module
  namespace: default
spec:
  classes:
    TestClass:
      properties:
        TestProperty:
          type: string
    TestClass2:
      baseClass: TestClass
      properties:
        TestProperty2:
          type: list
          subType: string
    TestClass3:
      baseClass: TestClass2
      properties:
        TestProperty3:
          type: list
          subType: TestClass

This is then ingested by kadense components and converted into classes in .Net, so the above would essentially become the equivalent of the following:

public class TestClass
{
    public string TestProperty { get; set; }
}

public class TestClass2 : TestClass
{
    public List<string> TestProperty2 { get; set; }
}

public class TestClass3 : TestClass2
{
    public List<TestClass> TestProperty3 { get; set; }
}

We've also created conversion modules to assist in converting from one data type to another:

apiVersion: kadense.io/v1
kind: MalleableConverterModule
metadata:
  name: converter
  namespace: default
spec:
  converters:
    FromTutorialV1ToTutorialV2:
        from:
            className: TutorialV1
            moduleName: conversion-tutorial
            moduleNamespace: default
        to:
            className: TutorialV2
            moduleName: conversion-tutorial
            moduleNamespace: default
        expressions:
            FirstName: Source.Author.Split(' ')[0]
            Surname: Source.Author.Split(' ')[1]

Full details of Malleable Modules is available in the documentation