On Fri, Jul 28, 2000 at 08:33:57AM -0700, Michael Nachbaur wrote:
>  <Warn priority="low">
>    <warning class="Off Topic"/>
>    <warning class="Long"/>
>  </Warn>
>  
>  I'm not exactly sure where to send this, but here it goes:
>  Has anyone completed/started an abstract database class at all?  I've written some for ver
y specific applications, but I want a more general-purpose tool.  I'm about to start develop
ment on one, but wanted to get feedback from the world-at-large to see what features you wou
ld want first (or if anyone has already started one).
>  
>  The classes I've created/used before, are like:
>  my $order = new Order( oid => '1234567' );
>  $order->fetch();
>  foreach my $order_line ( $order->Lines ) {
>    print $order_line->Description, $order_line->Price;
>  }
>  
>  I'd like to interact with a database, update data, save data, etc.  without having to actu
ally call any SQL code.  And, if I modify my database schema, I'd like the classes to automa
tically adapt.
>  
>  The way I've done this before, is create a series of classes with AUTOLOAD subs in them wh
ich intercept the name of the method being called, and then updating that specific field in 
the record.
>  
>  How I"d like to implement it would be to define an XML file with represents the way my dat
a is structured in the database.  This way, the objects can determine when to cache data, an
d when to commit its values to the database for maximum efficiency.  An example could be:

I have an object database abstraction that I use for a bunch of stuff, including a set of RD
F libraries. "object" is a perl datastructure defined by an SQL table. The purpose of Object
DB is to allow programs to store objects, create objects, load objects from the DB (includin
g all objects linked via external keys) and cache the DB interactions to keep it all efficie
nt. The bulk of the work is in an importer that reads a database structure and generates a .
pm with class defs, and a bunch of code for handling the implications of unique indexes.

Take a look at http://www.w3.org/1999/02/26-modules/ and http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/perl/modul
es/W3C/Database/ to see if you are interested in leveraging off ObjectDB or just ripping off
 code. 

-- 
-eric

(eric@w3.org)