Hacking Watson with Haskell - Part 1

Vehbi Sinan Tunalioglu - Aug 15 - - Dev Community

Watson is a command-line tool that helps you to track your time. It is simple and powerful, yet it lacks some features that I would like to have. In this blog post, I will start hacking Watson with Haskell.

Motivation

I have been using Watson since end of 2022. It is a simple and powerful tool that taught me how I spend my time.

On one hand, it lacks some features such as taking notes, integrating with my calendar or TODO list, etc... On the other hand, it keeps the data in a very simple format that can be easily read and manipulated.

I have been thinking about hacking Watson for a while. I have some ideas such as bulk editing, integrating with my pomodoro timer and tracking if my daily plan and its execution are aligned.

I am planning to do a few blog posts both to document my journey and to share my progress.

Program

This blog post is a Literate Haskell program that reads the Watson frames from a JSON file and prints them to the standard output. That's it for this blog post.

Before we start, how does a Watson frames file look like?

A Watson frames file is a JSON array of Watson frames. And a Watson frame is a JSON array with 6 elements:

[
  1629043200, // Start time
  1629046800, // End time
  "project", // Project name
  "frame-id", // Unique frame ID
  ["tag1", "tag2"], // Tags
  1629046800 // Update time
]
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Let's start with the language extensions:

{-# LANGUAGE RecordWildCards #-}
{-# LANGUAGE TypeApplications #-}
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We will use one Haskell package in addition to the libraries coming with the GHC: aeson. Here are our imports:

import Data.Time.Clock.POSIX (posixSecondsToUTCTime)
import System.Environment (getArgs)
import qualified Data.Aeson as Aeson
import qualified Data.Text as T
import qualified Data.Time as Time
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Our entry point function has 3 jobs to do:

  1. Read the path to the frames JSON file from the command line arguments.
  2. Attempt to read the frames from the file.
  3. Print the frames to the standard output if reading is successful, otherwise print an error message. 
main :: IO ()
main = do
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First, attempt to read the path from the command line arguments. Note that the head function is a partial function and it will throw an exception if the list is empty. We are using it here because we are expecting the path to the frames JSON file as the first argument. And I am lazy:

  fp <- head <$> getArgs
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Then, attempt to read the frames from the file. We are using the readFrames function that we will define later. It returns an Either value:

  eFrames <- readFrames fp
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By now, we have a result of type Either String [Frame]. We will pattern match to print the frames to the standard output if reading is successful, otherwise print an error message:

  case eFrames of
    Left err -> putStrLn ("ERROR! " <> err)
    Right frames -> mapM_ print frames
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That's as far as our main function goes. Now, let's define the Frame data type which is a simple record type:

data Frame = Frame
  { frameId :: !T.Text
  , frameSince :: !Time.UTCTime
  , frameUntil :: !Time.UTCTime
  , frameProject :: !T.Text
  , frameTags :: ![T.Text]
  , frameUpdatedAt :: !Time.UTCTime
  }
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... and add the Show and Eq instances for it:

  deriving (Show, Eq)
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Our program still does not know how to read the Frame data type from a JSON file. We will define an instance of the FromJSON type class for it:

instance Aeson.FromJSON Frame where
  parseJSON v = do
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Here, we will ask the parser to parse the JSON value into an array which is inferred from the pattern match:

    arr <- Aeson.parseJSON v
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Let's pattern match. We need an array with exactly 6 elements:

    case arr of
      [fSince, fUntil, fProj, fId, fTags, fUpdated] -> do
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Now we can continue parsing individual elements. Note that we are using exactly the same names for the fields as in the Frame record so that we can use RecordWildCards extension to fill the record at the end:

        frameId <- Aeson.parseJSON fId
        frameSince <- fromEpoch <$> Aeson.parseJSON fSince
        frameUntil <- fromEpoch <$> Aeson.parseJSON fUntil
        frameProject <- Aeson.parseJSON fProj
        frameTags <- Aeson.parseJSON fTags
        frameUpdatedAt <- fromEpoch <$> Aeson.parseJSON fUpdated
        pure $ Frame {..}
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If there no less or more than 6 elements in the array, we should fail with an error message:

      _ -> fail "Frame: expected an array of 6 elements"
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Finally, we will define the fromEpoch function that converts an epoch time to a UTCTime value:

    where
      fromEpoch = posixSecondsToUTCTime . fromIntegral @Int
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Now, we can define the readFrames function that reads the frames from a JSON file:

readFrames :: FilePath -> IO (Either String [Frame])
readFrames fp = do
  frames <- Aeson.eitherDecodeFileStrict fp
  pure $ case frames of
    Left err -> Left ("Failed to parse frames: " <> err)
    Right fs -> Right fs
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Done!

As usual, let's create a symbolic link to the source code file:

ln -sr \
  content/posts/2024-08-15_hacking-watson-part-1.md  \
  content/posts/2024-08-15_hacking-watson-part-1.lhs
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Let's download sample Watson frames JSON file:

curl -sLD - -o /tmp/frames.json https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TailorDev/Watson/master/tests/resources/autocompletion/frames
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..., run our program:

runhaskell -pgmLmarkdown-unlit content/posts/2024-08-15_hacking-watson-part-1.lhs /tmp/frames.json
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..., and see the output:

Frame {frameId = "41dcffb7bd74442794b9385c3e8891fc", frameSince = 2018-10-16 09:46:15 UTC, frameUntil = 2018-10-16 10:27:29 UTC, frameProject = "project1", frameTags = ["tag1"], frameUpdatedAt = 2018-10-16 10:27:29 UTC}
Frame {frameId = "e8b53f1dda684672806e0f347d2b11fc", frameSince = 2019-01-04 07:56:31 UTC, frameUntil = 2019-01-04 08:10:27 UTC, frameProject = "project2", frameTags = ["tag2"], frameUpdatedAt = 2019-01-04 08:10:27 UTC}
Frame {frameId = "ef9933131f254b6fa94dda2a85107195", frameSince = 2019-02-13 13:39:59 UTC, frameUntil = 2019-02-13 14:30:00 UTC, frameProject = "project1", frameTags = ["tag1"], frameUpdatedAt = 2019-02-13 14:51:33 UTC}
Frame {frameId = "f4f78aa79744440b9cbd28edef1ba0b0", frameSince = 2019-02-14 13:20:00 UTC, frameUntil = 2019-02-14 13:48:37 UTC, frameProject = "project3-A", frameTags = ["tag2"], frameUpdatedAt = 2019-02-14 13:48:37 UTC}
Frame {frameId = "10c6ff8612c84b239b5141cd04f10415", frameSince = 2019-02-22 10:00:00 UTC, frameUntil = 2019-02-22 10:34:02 UTC, frameProject = "project3-A", frameTags = ["tag2"], frameUpdatedAt = 2019-02-22 10:34:02 UTC}
Frame {frameId = "e113e26dbf8d4db3ba6361a73709ffd6", frameSince = 2019-03-07 10:20:00 UTC, frameUntil = 2019-03-07 11:06:08 UTC, frameProject = "project1", frameTags = ["tag2"], frameUpdatedAt = 2019-03-07 11:06:08 UTC}
Frame {frameId = "d5185c8e811a40efbad43d2ff775f5e8", frameSince = 2019-03-13 15:12:46 UTC, frameUntil = 2019-03-13 15:50:00 UTC, frameProject = "project2", frameTags = ["tag2"], frameUpdatedAt = 2019-03-14 07:50:48 UTC}
Frame {frameId = "379f567a9d584498aa8729a170b8b8ad", frameSince = 2019-03-25 09:45:14 UTC, frameUntil = 2019-03-25 10:28:55 UTC, frameProject = "project3-B", frameTags = ["tag2"], frameUpdatedAt = 2019-03-25 10:28:55 UTC}
Frame {frameId = "f4f7429d70454175bb87ce2254bbd925", frameSince = 2019-04-12 06:30:00 UTC, frameUntil = 2019-04-12 07:00:00 UTC, frameProject = "project4", frameTags = ["tag3"], frameUpdatedAt = 2019-04-12 10:00:10 UTC}
Frame {frameId = "af9fe637030a465ba279abc3c1441b66", frameSince = 2019-04-30 09:09:29 UTC, frameUntil = 2019-04-30 09:30:25 UTC, frameProject = "project3-B", frameTags = ["tag3"], frameUpdatedAt = 2019-04-30 09:30:26 UTC}
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Wrap-Up

This was an exciting blog post for me, because it is a new journey to new absurds.

I needed to read the Watson frames from a JSON file, so that I can start manipulating them. We now have an internal data definition for the Watson frames and a program that reads them from a JSON file. We are ready for the next step...

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