Using diesel for PostgreSQL access

[mvolkmann]

I'm trying to follow the instructions on this "Getting Started" page:
https://diesel.rs/guides/getting-started/

My basic attempt at using diesel is in GitHub.
I'm getting an error from the compiler here:
https://github.com/mvolkmann/rust-diesel-demo/blob/master/src/bin/main.rs#L12
It says "the trait
diesel::deserialize::FromSql<diesel::sql_types::Nullable<diesel::sql_types::Text>, _>
is not implemented for *const str
I could use some help figuring out what I'm doing wrong.

[mbrubeck]

Since your schema uses Nullable<Text> for the breed and name fields, your Rust type should use Option<String> for those fields:

#[derive(Queryable)]
pub struct Dog {
    pub id: i32,
    pub name: Option<String>,
    pub breed: Option<String>,
}

[mvolkmann]

It turns out I wanted "NOT NULL" on the name and breed columns, so I made that change to the table. That didn't resolve the error I'm getting here though: https://github.com/mvolkmann/rust-diesel-demo/blob/master/src/bin/main.rs#L12

[alice]

You have not removed Nullable from your schema file. Until you do so, diesel will still think that the field is nullable.

[mvolkmann]

Ah, I had changed the table schema in PostgreSQL, but didn't modify the schema.rs file. Doing that fixed the problem. I removed Nullable from that file manually, but I suppose I could have run diesel setup again to regenerate it. But I think that would have created new migration files which I didn't want.

[alice]

Usually when I have used diesel, I have managed the schema file manually instead of using the diesel command-line tool.

[mvolkmann]

Now that I can query a Postgres table using diesel I want to learn how to insert, update, and delete rows. I want to start by deleting all the rows in a table. Here is my attempt. There are two errors. The first is how I'm passing the database connection to my delete_dogs function. It's not clear to me what the type needs to be and I couldn't find any examples of passing a connection. The second issue is the return type of this function. I think it should return Ok with the number of deleted rows or Error containing a diesel::result::Error value, but I couldn't get it to be happy with my return type.

https://github.com/mvolkmann/rust-diesel-demo/blob/master/src/bin/main.rs#L9

[alice]

How does it fail?

[mvolkmann]

It says "the value of the associated types Backend (from trait diesel::Connection), TransactionManager (from trait diesel::Connection) must be specified".
So the issue must be the way I am specifying the type of the conn parameter.

[alice]

I would probably go for either generics

fn delete_dogs<C: Connection>(conn: &C) -> Result<usize, Error> {
    diesel::delete(dogs).execute(conn)?
}

or just use the fully specified type.

fn delete_dogs(conn: &PgConnection) -> Result<usize, Error> {
    diesel::delete(dogs).execute(conn)?
}

[mvolkmann]

I have this working now. Thanks so much to @mbrubeck and @Alice for all the help! I think it's a pretty good example of implementing all the CRUD operations on a Postgres table using diesel. I'm certainly open to feedback if there is anything I could have done better. In any case, I'm hoping others new to Rust will find this useful. I've made the code as simple as I could.

https://github.com/mvolkmann/rust-diesel-demo