Operating on an F# List of Union Types - list

Question

This is a continuation of my question at F# List of Union Types. Thanks to the helpful feedback, I was able to create a list of Reports, with Report being either Detail or Summary. Here's the data definition once more:
module Data
type Section = { Header: string;
Lines: string list;
Total: string }
type Detail = { State: string;
Divisions: string list;
Sections: Section list }
type Summary = { State: string;
Office: string;
Sections: Section list }
type Report = Detail of Detail | Summary of Summary
Now that I've got the list of Reports in a variable called reports, I want to iterate over those Report objects and perform operations based on each one. The operations are the same except for the cases of dealing with either Detail.Divisions or Summary.Office. Obviously, I have to handle those differently. But I don't want to duplicate all the code for handling the similar State and Sections of each.
My first (working) idea is something like the following:
for report in reports do
let mutable isDetail = false
let mutable isSummary = false
match report with
| Detail _ -> isDetail <- true
| Summary _ -> isSummary <- true
...
This will give me a way to know when to handle Detail.Divisions rather than Summary.Office. But it doesn't give me an object to work with. I'm still stuck with report, not knowing which it is, Detail or Summary, and also unable to access the attributes. I'd like to convert report to the appropriate Detail or Summary and then use the same code to process either case, with the exception of Detail.Divisions and Summary.Office. Is there a way to do this?
Thanks.

Answer 1

You could do something like this:
for report in reports do
match report with
| Detail { State = s; Sections = l }
| Summary { State = s; Sections = l } ->
// common processing for state and sections (using bound identifiers s and l)
match report with
| Detail { Divisions = l } ->
// unique processing for divisions
| Summary { Office = o } ->
// unique processing for office

Answer 2

The answer by #kvb is probably the approach I would use if I had the data structure you described. However, I think it would make sense to think whether the data types you have are the best possible representation.
The fact that both Detail and Summary share two of the properties (State and Sections) perhaps implies that there is some common part of a Report that is shared regardless of the kind of report (and the report can either add Divisions if it is detailed or just Office if if is summary).
Something like that would be better expressed using the following (Section stays the same, so I did not include it in the snippet):
type ReportInformation =
| Divisions of string list
| Office of string
type Report =
{ State : string;
Sections : Section list
Information : ReportInformation }
If you use this style, you can just access report.State and report.Sections (to do the common part of the processing) and then you can match on report.Information to do the varying part of the processing.
EDIT - In answer to Jeff's comment - if the data structure is already fixed, but the view has changed, you can use F# active patterns to write "adaptor" that provides access to the old data structure using the view that I described above:
let (|Report|) = function
| Detail dt -> dt.State, dt.Sections
| Summary st -> st.State, st.Sections
let (|Divisions|Office|) = function
| Detail dt -> Divisions dt.Divisions
| Summary st -> Office st.Office
The first active pattern always succeeds and extracts the common part. The second allows you to distinguish between the two cases. Then you can write:
let processReport report =
let (Report(state, sections)) = report
// Common processing
match report wiht
| Divisions divs -> // Divisions-specific code
| Office ofc -> // Offices-specific code
This is actually an excellent example of how F# active patterns provide an abstraction that allows you to hide implementation details.

Answer 3

kvb's answer is good, and probably what I would use. But the way you've expressed your problem sounds like you want classic inheritance.
type ReportPart(state, sections) =
member val State = state
member val Sections = sections
type Detail(state, sections, divisions) =
inherit ReportPart(state, sections)
member val Divisions = divisions
type Summary(state, sections, office) =
inherit ReportPart(state, sections)
member val Office = office
Then you can do precisely what you expect:
for report in reports do
match report with
| :? Detail as detail -> //use detail.Divisions
| :? Summary as summary -> //use summary.Office
//use common properties

Answer 4

You can pattern match on the Detail or Summary record in each of the union cases when you match and handle the Divisions or Office value with a separate function e.g.
let blah =
for report in reports do
let out = match report with
| Detail({ State = state; Divisions = divisions; Sections = sections } as d) ->
Detail({ d with Divisions = (handleDivisions divisions) })
| Summary({ State = state; Office = office; Sections = sections } as s) ->
Summary( { s with Office = handleOffice office })
//process out

Answer 5

You can refactor the code to have a utility function for each common field and use nested pattern matching:
let handleReports reports =
reports |> List.iter (function
| Detail {State = s; Sections = ss; Divisions = ds} ->
handleState s
handleSections ss
handleDivisions ds
| Summary {State = s; Sections = ss; Office = o} ->
handleState s
handleSections ss
handleOffice o)
You can also filter Detail and Summary to process them separately in different functions:
let getDetails reports =
List.choose (function Detail d -> Some d | _ -> None) reports
let getSummaries reports =
List.choose (function Summary s -> Some s | _ -> None) reports