Provide regex pattern shortcuts to help users define cleaner models

[aymanfarhat]

Defining larger models with several regex patterns with lots of repetition can become a maintenance hell for users. Especially that many patterns are usually common ones such as URLs, numbers only, negative numbers etc...

Was thinking, it would be cool to have a pre-defined set of patterns in the lib to allow users to do shortcuts when defining models. Example:

Instead of having to define something like this as a model:

  const baseEntryPattern = {
    pageref: /(?<pageRef>.*)/,
    startedDateTime: /(?<startedDateTime>.*)/,
    request: {
      method: /(?<requestMethod>GET|POST)/,
      url: /(?<requestUrl>[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%._\+~#=]{1,256}\.[a-zA-Z0-9()]{1,6}\b([-a-zA-Z0-9()@:%_\+.~#?&//=]*))/,
      httpVersion: /(?<requestHttpVersion>.*)/,
      headersSize: /^(?<requestHeaderSize>\-?(\d+\.?\d*|\d*\.?\d+))$/,
      bodySize: /^(?<requestHeaderSize>\-?(\d+\.?\d*|\d*\.?\d+))$/,
    },
    response: {
      status: /^(?<responseStatus>[0-9]{3})/,
      content: {
        size: /^(?<responseContentSize>\-?(\d+\.?\d*|\d*\.?\d+))$/,
      },
      headers: [
        { name: /content-type/i, value: /(?<responseContentType>.*)/ },
        { name: /content-length/i, value: /(?<responseContentLength>.*)/ },
        { name: /cache-control/i, value: /(?<responseCacheControl>.*)/ },
      ]
    },
    timings: (val) => val,
    time: /^(?<time>\-?(\d+\.?\d*|\d*\.?\d+))$/
  };

Would be cleaner to (optionally) use a helper method in the module to define common patterns this way:

  const baseEntryPattern = {
    pageref: Objectron.patterns.any(),
    startedDateTime: Objectron.patterns.any('startDateTime'),
    request: {
      method: /(?<requestMethod>GET|POST)/,
      url: Objectron.patterns.url('requestUrl'),
      httpVersion: Objectron.patterns.any('httpVersionName'),
    },
    response: {
      status: /^(?<responseStatus>[0-9]{3})/,
      content: {
        size: Objectron.patterns.anyNumber('responseContentSize')
      },
    },
    timings: (val) => val,
    time: /^(?<time>\-?(\d+\.?\d*|\d*\.?\d+))$/
  };

Can save lots of effort in maintaining and re-implementing common patterns by the user especially that as the model gets more complex, repeated patterns become confusing and error prone.This could potentially be achieved via implementing a set of methods to generate regex expressions based on pre-defined patterns.

What do you think?

[Link-]

Loving the contributions @aymanfarhat keep em coming for sure. Yeah it'll definitely be cool to define helper matchers that are extendable and we provide a default set off the shelf. Doesn't cost much to put it in place also.