Fluid Functions, Lombiq Training Demo updates - This week in Orchard (04/02/2022)
Fluid provides optional support for functions, optimizing SlugServie and MediaTokenService, and hiding a shape sample in the Lombiq Training Demo for Orchard Core are the topics of this week. Check out this post for the details!
Orchard Core updates
Optimize SlugService
The goal here was to increase the performance of the SlugService as much as we can. Marko Lahma went through the thing, and the problem was that the ZString haven't been used, it was leaking all the time thus bad perf.
BenchmarkDotNet=v0.13.1, OS=Windows 10.0.22000
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, 1 CPU, 32 logical and 16 physical cores
.NET SDK=6.0.101
[Host] : .NET 6.0.1 (6.0.121.56705), X64 RyuJIT
DefaultJob : .NET 6.0.1 (6.0.121.56705), X64 RyuJIT
General easy rule (when implicit usings aren't being used): If there's using System.Linq; at the top of the performance-critical code, try to find a way to get rid of it.
Reduce allocations in MediaTokenService and improve performance
Since Orchard Core can use all .NET 6 goodness, Marko Lahma improved the performance of the MediaTokenService too. And what did he change?
- Don't ToString StringValues, keep them as-is as in dictionary once built.
- Parse commands and other commands with one pass using constructs that QueryHelpers uses.
- Allocate static command arrays to return from processors, some of them were always returning new ones.
- Change GetHash not to allocation anonymous closure each time by using Try/Set construct, using the same logic that extension method GetOrCreate uses.
- Change hash calculation to use stackalloc and spans for workloads < 1024 bytes (common case).
- Use the custom AddQueryString method that understands spans and concrete a dictionary type.
Here you can see the numbers:
Before:
After:
Fluid functions
Now there is a new optional feature in Fluid called Functions. It's optional because the goal of Fluid is to be able to as close as possible to Liquid, but Liquid doesn't have Functions. If you open up the readme file of Fluid, you can see a new section there called Functions. There is a new option in the FluidParser that you can say AllowFunctions. By setting the AllowFunctions to true, you can call functions like this: {{ field('user') }}. The format of this one is {{ identifier('arguments')}} just like in JavaScript or in C#.
Or you can say {{ field('pass', type='password') }} which is like {{ identifier('values', type='named value') }}.
How it works is a field is an object, a FluidValue of type FunctionValue. In Fluid, anytime we access something like {% assign name = "Bill" %}, the name is a FluidValue, and in this case, the type is StringValue. When we find a field, the field is a value of type FunctionValue, and the FunctionValue implements the method name InvokeAsync. There is InvokeAsync, there is GetPropertyAsync, etc., everything that an object can do, and when this FunctionValue's Invoke is invoked it will execute something. And to invoke a FluidValue you use parenthesis. If we do parenthesis on something like name, which is a string, we can do name(), it will invoke the string, but it just returns NIL value. So you can invoke name if you want, it will not do anything. If it's a function, it will do something.
To learn more about Functions, check out the documentation of Fluid!
News from the community
Hiding a shape sample in the Lombiq Training Demo for Orchard Core
The Lombiq Training Demo for Orchard Core is a demo Orchard Core CMS module for training purposes guiding you to become an Orchard developer.
And the module has a new sample, which is a shape table provider that hides shapes. Check out the code of the new ShapeHidigingShapeTableProvider here!
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