On Fri, 31 May 2002, Barry Hoggard wrote:

>  Do you have a favorite approach for writing the Model objects?  At
>  Investorama we created a class called TableObject that would deal with
>  getting/setting values from the database, plus doing data verification
>  like checking for values being present and well-formed XML in fields
>  that needed it.  I still use that approach on my consulting projects.
>  It's not a very complex object, and it doesn't do things recursively,
>  like mapping an attribute to an object and handling that object as well.
> 
>  TableObject doesn't act as a base class.  It just becomes one of the
>  attributes of the object.
> 
>  A typical invocation is something like this:
> 
>  my %fields = (
>                 id => { type => 'num', pkey => 1, sequence => 'seq_users' },
>                 email => { type => 'string', required => 1 },
>                 password => { type => 'string', required => 1 },
>                 first_name => { type => 'string', required => 1 },
>                 last_name => { type => 'string', required => 1 },
>                 valid => { type => 'num', required => 1},
>                 member_id => { type => 'num' },
>                 );
> 
>  my $table = NAIC::TableObject->new(DBH => $self->dbh,
>                                      OBJECT => $self,
>                                      TABLE => 'users',
>                                      FIELDS => \%fields,
>                                      VERIFY => 1);
> 
>  $table is then put into $self as an attribute called '_table'.
>  Storing/retrieving/verifying are done with $self->_table->store etc.  It
>  expects that the attributes of an object like $self->email match the
>  database columns.

Alzabo could handle a _lot_ of this for you.  Class::DBI could handle some
of it (though less).

People should use one of those (and check out poop.sf.net for more
options) rather than re-inventing the wheel.


-dave

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