erlias

Compile an Alias Module for Erlang

About this Library

(This was originally a part of sql_bridge, but has been split off into its own library for others to use, if they want.)

There are a number of other Erlang module alias libraries out there, but they all appear to be parse transforms, where you must compile your modules with the parse transform. This gives an interesting level of flexibility, where you can have different module aliases for different calling modules.

This is not that.

This is not a parse transform. This creates a new globally accessible module. And you do not have to modify your source code to use this in any way, or recompile any modules to make it work. This new module simply maps from the new module to the original module.

This was originally built for sql_bridge so that instead of calling

sql_bridge:q(Query)

you could simply call

db:q(Query)

Usage

Sometime (probably during application startup), call the following

erlias:build(my_super_long_module_name, short).

This will compile a new module called short that takes the exports from my_super_long_module_name and forwards them to the long module.

Instead of calling:

my_super_long_module_name:some_function().

You can now call

short:some_function().

Because short is a new globally accessible module, it can be called from any module or from the Erlang shell.

How it works

It literally just looks at the exports of my_super_long_module_name and creates a mapper module:

For example, if some_function() is the only exported function in my_super_long_module_name, the true implementation of short would be this:

-module(short).
-export([some_function/0]).

some_function() ->
	my_super_long_module_name:some_function().

Another Function

You can also call erlias:build_text(OriginalMod, NewModule) and this will return the string of the generated module (it won't compile or load the module, just give you the text).

Author

Jesse Gumm