In the DynamoDB API, expressions (e.g., ConditionExpression and many more)
may contain references to column names ("#name") or to values (":val")
given in a separate part of the request - ExpressionAttributeNames and
ExpressionAttributeValues respectively.
Before this patch, we resolved these references as part of the expression's
evaluation. This approach had two downsides:
1. It often misdiagnosed (both false negatives and false positives) cases
of unused names and values in expressions. We already had two xfailing
tests with examples - which pass after this patch. This patch also
adds two additional tests, which failed before this patch and pass
with it.
2. In one of the following patches we will add support for FilterExpression,
where the same expression is used repeatedly on many items. It is a waste
(as well as makes the code uglier) to resolve the same references again
and again each time the expression is evaluated. We should be able
to do it just once.
So this patch introduces an intermediate step between parsing and evaluating
an expression - "resolving" the expression. The new resolve_*() functions
modify the already parsed expression, replacing references to attribute
names and constant values by the actual names and values taken from the
request. The resolve_*() functions also keep track which references were
used, making it very easy to check (as DynamoDB does) if there are any
unused names or values, before starting the evaluation.
The interface of evaluate() functions become much simpler - they no longer
need to know the original request (which was previously needed for
ExpressionAttributeNames/Values), the table's schema (which was previously
needed only for some error checking), keep track of which references were
used. This simplification is helpful for using the expressions in contexts
where these things (request and schema) are no longer conveniently available,
namely in FilterExpression.
A small side-benefit of this patch is that it moves a bit of code, which
handled resolving of references in expressions, from executor.cc to
expressions.cc. This is just the first step in a bigger effort to
reduce the size of executor.cc by moving code to smaller source files.
There is no attempt in this patch to move as much code as we can.
We will move more code in a separate patch in this series.
Fixes#6572.
Signed-off-by: Nadav Har'El <nyh@scylladb.com>
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