Experimental features

warning

Be cautious when using experimental features in production environments, as their stability is uncertain and they may receive breaking changes in upcoming releases.

"Experimental Features" are cutting-edge additions to Serverpod that are currently under development or testing or whose API is not yet stable. These features allow developers to explore new functionalities and provide feedback, helping shape the future of Serverpod. However, they may not be fully stable or complete and are subject to change.

Experimental features are disabled by default, i.e. they are not active unless the developer opts-in.

Experimental internal APIs

Experimental internal APIs are placed under the experimental sub-API of the Serverpod class. When an experimental feature matures it is moved from experimental to Serverpod proper. If possible, the experimental API will remain for some time as @deprecated, and then removed.

Command-line enabled features

Some of the experimental features are enabled by including the --experimental-features flag when running the serverpod command:

$ serverpod generate --experimental-features=all

The current options you can pass are:

Feature	Description
all	Enables all available experimental features.
inheritance	Allows using the extends keyword in your model files to create class hierarchies.

Inheritance

warning

Adding a new subtype to a class hierarchy may introduce breaking changes for older clients. Ensure client compatibility when expanding class hierarchies to avoid deserialization issues.

Inheritance allows you to define class hierarchies in your model files by sharing fields between parent and child classes, simplifying class structures and promoting consistency by avoiding duplicate field definitions.

Extending a Class

To inherit from a class, use the extends keyword in your model files, as shown below:

class: ParentClass
fields:
    name: String

class: ChildClass
extends: ParentClass
fields:
    int: age

This will generate a class with both name and age field.

class ChildClass extends ParentClass {
    String name
    int age
}

Sealed Classes

In addition to the extends keyword, you can also use the sealed keyword to create sealed class hierarchies, enabling exhaustive type checking. With sealed classes, the compiler knows all subclasses, ensuring that every possible case is handled when working with the model.

class: ParentClass
sealed: true
fields:
    name: String

class: ChildClass
extends: ParentClass
fields:
    age: int

This will generate the following classes:

sealed class ParentClass {
    String name;
}

class ChildClass extends ParentClass {
    String name;
    int age;
}

info

All files in a sealed hierarchy need to be located in the same directory.

Exception monitoring

Serverpod allows you to monitor exceptions in a central and flexible way by using the new diagnostic event handlers. These work both for exceptions thrown in application code and from the framework (e.g. server startup or shutdown errors).

This can be used to get all exceptions reported in realtime to services for monitoring and diagnostics, such as Sentry, Highlight, and Datadog.

It is easy to implement handlers and define custom filters within them. Any number of handlers can be added. They are run asynchronously and should not affect the behavior or response times of the server.

These event handlers are for diagnostics only, they do not allow any behavior-changing action such as suppressing exceptions or converting them to another exception type.

Setup

This feature is enabled by providing one ore more DiagnosticEventHandler implementations to the Serverpod constructor's experimentalFeatures specification.

Example:

  var serverpod = Serverpod(
    ...
    experimentalFeatures: ExperimentalFeatures(
      diagnosticEventHandlers: [
        AsEventHandler((event, {required space, required context}) {
          print('$event  Origin is $space\n  Context is ${context.toJson()}');
        }),
      ],
    ),
  );

Submitting diagnostic events

The API for submitting diagnostic events from user code, e.g. from endpoint methods, web calls, and future calls, is the new method submitDiagnosticEvent under the experimental member of the Serverpod class.

  void submitDiagnosticEvent(
    DiagnosticEvent event, {
    required Session session,
  })

Usage example:

class DiagnosticEventTestEndpoint extends Endpoint {
  Future<String> submitExceptionEvent(Session session) async {
    try {
      throw Exception('An exception is thrown');
    } catch (e, stackTrace) {
      session.serverpod.experimental.submitDiagnosticEvent(
        ExceptionEvent(e, stackTrace),
        session: session,
      );
    }
    return 'success';
  }
}

Guidelines for handlers

A DiagnosticEvent represents an event that occurs in the server. DiagnosticEventHandler implementations can react to these events in order to gain insights into the behavior of the server.

As the name suggests the handlers should perform diagnostics only, and not have any responsibilities that the regular functioning of the server depends on.

The registered handlers are typically run concurrently, can not depend on each other, and asynchronously - they are not awaited by the operation they are triggered from.

If a handler throws an exception it will be logged to stderr and otherwise ignored.

Test support

This feature also includes support via the Serverpod test framework. This means that the withServerpod construct can be used together with diagnostic event handlers to test that the events are submitted and propagated as intended.

Example:

void main() {
  var exceptionHandler = TestExceptionHandler();

  withServerpod('Given withServerpod with a diagnostic event handler',
      experimentalFeatures: ExperimentalFeatures(
        diagnosticEventHandlers: [exceptionHandler],
      ), (sessionBuilder, endpoints) {
    test(
        'when calling an endpoint method that submits an exception event '
        'then the diagnostic event handler gets called', () async {
      final result = await endpoints.diagnosticEventTest
          .submitExceptionEvent(sessionBuilder);
      expect(result, 'success');

      final record = await exceptionHandler.events.first.timeout(Duration(seconds: 1));
      expect(record.event.exception, isA<Exception>());
      expect(record.space, equals(OriginSpace.application));
      expect(record.context, isA<DiagnosticEventContext>());
      expect(
          record.context.toJson(),
          allOf([
            containsPair('serverId', 'default'),
            containsPair('serverRunMode', 'test'),
            containsPair('serverName', 'Server default'),
          ]));
    });
  });
}