· f interfaces

F#: Explicit interface implementation

I’ve been writing some code to map between CouchDB documents and F# objects and something which I re-learned while doing this is the way that interfaces work in F#.

In F# when you have a class which implements an interface that class makes use of explicit interface implementation.

This means that in order to access any members of the interface that the class implements you need to specifically refer to the interface by upcasting the value using the ':>' operator.

Given the following interface and class definitions:

type CouchDBDocument =
    abstract DocType : string

type UserDocument =
    { UserName:string; FirstName:string; Surname:string }
    interface CouchDBDocument with member x.DocType = "User"

If we had the following value:

let mark = { UserName = "mneedham"; FirstName = "Mark"; Surname = "Needham" }

In order to access the 'DocType' member of 'mark' we would need to do the following:

(mark :> CouchDBDocument).DocType

Coming from the world of C# I had expected that it would be possible to define a value as being of type 'CouchDBDocument' and then pass in a value of UserDocument like this:

let mark : CouchDBDocument = { UserName = "mneedham"; FirstName = "Mark"; Surname = "Needham" };;

But that doesn’t actually compile:

error FS0191: The type CouchDBDocument does not contain a field UserName

It is possible to do this in C# as well although the implementation would be implicit in C# unless we explicitly declare it to be explicit like so:

public interface CouchDBDocument
{
    string DocType { get; }
}

public class UserDocument : CouchDBDocument
{
     string CouchDBDocument.DocType
    {
        get { return "User"; }
    }
}

To access the 'DocType' property in this case we would need to be explicitly referring to the 'CouchDBDocument':

CouchDBDocument mark = new UserDocument();
Console.WriteLine(mark.DocType);

The Real World Functional Programming book also has a chapter which describes interfaces in C# and F# and the way they differ very clearly.

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