Railroad Error Handling in Rust

main.rs

// User password resets could benefit from railroad error handling
// because there are so many things to go wrong along the way
//
// 1. I forgot my password, send me a link
// 2. I got the link, let me enter a new password
// 3. Password and confirmation must match
// 4. Password must be at least 8, etc
// 5. Password was saved successfully
//
// There are many things that can go wrong and having a transaction
// to handle all of this would really be convenient.  For example,
// we want to keep the reset link active if the password saving doesn't
// work or if it doesn't match or meet password requirements.  Wrapping all
// this in a transaction would be much easier than having to clean up
// things after everything is over.  But to keep things simple, we will
// have to ignore database transactions.
//
// The real demonstration is on how to handle errors along the way.

// this is a user, say, from a database
// the view would protect the fields like password from being shown
#[derive(PartialEq, Clone)]
struct User<'a> {
    email: &'a str,
    password: &'a str,
    reset_link: Option<&'a str>,
}

fn forgot_password_link<'a>(users: &mut [User<'a>], email: &str) -> Result<User<'a>, &'a str> {
    if let Some(user_to_email) = users.iter_mut().find(|u| u.email == email) {
        // send email here

        // return user as success
        Ok(user_to_email.clone())
    } else {
        Err("No user found")
    }
}

fn reset_password<'a>(
    mut user: User<'a>,
    new_password: &'a str,
    new_password_confirm: &str,
) -> Result<User<'a>, &'a str> {
    if new_password != new_password_confirm {
        return Err("Passwords must match.");
    }

    if new_password.len() < 8 {
        return Err("Password needs to be at least 8.");
    }

    user.password = new_password;
    Ok(user)
}

fn save_password<'a>(mut database: Vec<User<'a>>, user: &User<'a>) -> Result<User<'a>, &'a str> {
    if let Some(user_to_update) = database.iter_mut().find(|u| u.email == user.email) {
        *user_to_update = user.clone();
        Ok(user.clone())
    } else {
        Err("No user found")
    }
}

fn delete_reset_link<'a>(user: &'a User<'a>) -> Result<User<'a>, &'a str> {
    // not shown: deleting the link field or row from a database
    Ok(user.clone())
}

fn main() {
    let user: User = User {
        email: "[email protected]",
        password: "12345678",
        reset_link: None,
    };

    // this represents state, no time to build a database
    let mut users = vec![user.clone()];

    // No matter what, the system tells you a password reset link was sent for security.
    // This detail is hard to represent but we would handle a Err very similarly to
    // Ok, but in this case, this demo is illustrating what is happening by printing.
    let result = forgot_password_link(&mut users, "[email protected]");
    match result {
        Ok(user) => println!("Check your email: {:?}", user.email),
        Err(s) => println!("I will still tell you to check your email: {}", s),
    }

    // Along the way, we get results.  The return could be the each step's data
    // that it just worked on.  If we just return an ID or some metadata like status
    // then we could go to the database to fetch the data we are going to work on next.
    // In this example, I am returning `user` because the User is the only thing being worked
    // on for password resets.
    //
    // This whole block would be put inside of a transaction (except for the emailing)
    // because it needs to be all or nothing.

    let user = reset_password(user, "new-password", "new-password").expect("Cannot reset password");
    println!("Password was reset to: {:?}", user.password);

    // In order to see errors as they happen, you can introduce problems since this
    // program is not interactive.  This is an example of how to introduce an error.
    // user.email = "invalid";

    let user = save_password(users, &user).expect("Could not save password");
    println!("Saved password for: {:?}", user.email);

    let user = delete_reset_link(&user).expect("Could not remove password link");
    println!("Deleted the password link for user: {:?}", user.email);
}

// How to introduce errors:
// 1. forgot_password_link(): change "[email protected]" to "[email protected]"
// 2. reset_password(): change one of the "new-password" to "asdf" or mismatched strings
// 3. save_password(): before save_password is called, mutate the user like `user.email = "invalid"`
// 4. delete_reset_link(): there is no way to fail this step in this demo
// These things (steps 2, 3 and 4) would be collected into a transaction.