Suppose I have this:

user> (def foo [{:id 1 :foo 123} {:id 2 :foo 456}])
#'user/foo
user> (def bar [{:foo_id 1 :bar 111} {:foo_id 1 :bar 222}])
#'user/bar

What I want is to "join" foo and bar so that each item in foo ends up with a sub-list of bars based on matching key fields.

In real life, these lists-of-hash-maps are coming out of a database via clojure.contrib.sql, so this is something I actually want to do pretty often. This is also vaguely similar to what you get out of a Rails-like ORM, where you end up with an object that has lists of sub-objects anywhere you have a one-to-many relationship.

Here's how I end up doing this in Clojure:

(defn one-to-many
  ([xs name ys f]
      (for [x xs :let [ys (filter (partial f x) ys)]]
        (assoc x name ys))))

Now I can do this:

user> (pprint (one-to-many foo :bars bar #(= (:id %1) (:foo_id %2))))
({:bars ({:foo_id 1, :bar 111} {:foo_id 1, :bar 222}), :id 1, :foo 123}
 {:bars (), :id 2, :foo 456})

And if I define a helper function:

(defn key=
  ([xkey ykey]
     #(= (xkey %1) (ykey %2))))

Then I can write it more concisely:

user> (pprint (one-to-many foo :bars bar (key= :id :foo_id)))
;; same as above

And if I have another "table" of data like this:

user> (def baz [{:foo_id 1 :baz 555} {:foo_id 2 :baz 999}])
#'user/baz

Then I can join them all like this:

user> (pprint (-> foo
                  (one-to-many :bars bar (key= :id :foo_id))
                  (one-to-many :bazzes baz (key= :id :foo_id))))
({:bazzes ({:foo_id 1, :baz 555}),
  :bars ({:foo_id 1, :bar 111} {:foo_id 1, :bar 222}),
  :id 1,
  :foo 123}
 {:bazzes ({:foo_id 2, :baz 999}), :bars (), :id 2, :foo 456})

This is pretty concise. It may be possible to do it in an even more concise way, (if so, do share). If I was willing to adhere to some Rails-y naming convention for my table names and for the id fields in my tables, I could make this shorter by not having to specify the names of the id fields, but I don't want to go there. It's trivial to write similar functions for a one-to-one relationship, or to use a join-table to "join" two tables with a many-to-many relationship.

I am happily surprised sometimes by how simple it is to roll my own version of things that previously seemed like dark magic. I used Rails for a long time and it seemed like a crapload of code must have gone into making the ORM work. But four lines of code gets me 75% of what I ever needed Rails' ORM for.

This may be more thanks to me opening my eyes a bit than to Clojure being awesome, but either way, I'll take it.