Ecosyste.ms: Awesome

An open API service indexing awesome lists of open source software.

Awesome Lists | Featured Topics | Projects

https://github.com/bestpractical/jifty-dbi


https://github.com/bestpractical/jifty-dbi

Last synced: about 1 month ago
JSON representation

Awesome Lists containing this project

README 

        
NAME

    Jifty::DBI - An object-relational persistence framework



DESCRIPTION

    Jifty::DBI deals with databases, so that you don't have to.



    This module provides an object-oriented mechanism for retrieving and

    updating data in a DBI-accessible database.



    This module is the direct descendant of DBIx::SearchBuilder. If you're

    familiar with SearchBuilder, Jifty::DBI should be quite familiar to you.



  Purpose

    Jifty::DBI::Record abstracts the agony of writing the common and

    generally simple SQL statements needed to serialize and deserialize an

    object to the database. In a traditional system, you would define

    various methods on your object 'create', 'read', 'update', and 'delete'

    being the most common. In each method you would have a SQL statement

    like:



      select * from table where value='blah';



    If you wanted to control what data a user could modify, you would have

    to do some special magic to make accessors do the right thing. Etc. The

    problem with this approach is that in a majority of the cases, the SQL

    is incredibly simple and the code from one method/object to the next was

    basically the same.



    



    Enter, Jifty::DBI::Record.



    With ::Record, you can in the simple case, remove all of that code and

    replace it by defining two methods and inheriting some code. It's pretty

    simple and incredibly powerful. For more complex cases, you can do more

    complicated things by overriding certain methods. Let's stick with the

    simple case for now.



  An Annotated Example

    The example code below makes the following assumptions:



    *   The database is 'postgres',



    *   The host is 'reason',



    *   The login name is 'mhat',



    *   The database is called 'example',



    *   The table is called 'simple',



    *   The table looks like so:



              id     integer     not NULL,   primary_key(id),

              foo    varchar(10),

              bar    varchar(10)



    First, let's define our record class in a new module named "Simple.pm".



      use warnings;

      use strict;



      package Simple;

      use Jifty::DBI::Schema;

      use Jifty::DBI::Record schema {

        column foo => type is 'text';

        column bar => type is 'text';

      };



      # your custom code goes here.



      1;



    Like all perl modules, this needs to end with a true value.



    Now, on to the code that will actually *do* something with this object.

    This code would be placed in your Perl script.



      use Jifty::DBI::Handle;

      use Simple;



    Use two packages, the first is where I get the DB handle from, the

    latter is the object I just created.



      my $handle = Jifty::DBI::Handle->new();

      $handle->connect(

          driver   => 'Pg',

          database => 'test',

          host     => 'reason',

          user     => 'mhat',

          password => ''

      );



    Creates a new Jifty::DBI::Handle, and then connects to the database

    using that handle. Pretty straight forward, the password '' is what I

    use when there is no password. I could probably leave it blank, but I

    find it to be more clear to define it.



     my $s = Simple->new( handle => $handle );



     $s->load_by_cols(id=>1);



    load_by_cols

        Takes a hash of column => value pairs and returns the *first* to

        match. First is probably lossy across databases vendors.



    load_from_hash

        Populates this record with data from a Jifty::DBI::Collection. I'm

        currently assuming that Jifty::DBI is what we use in cases where we

        expect > 1 record. More on this later.



    Now that we have a populated object, we should do something with it!

    ::Record automagically generates accessors and mutators for us, so all

    we need to do is call the methods. accessors are named "column"(), and

    Mutators are named "set_column"($). On to the example, just appending

    this to the code from the last example.



     print "ID  : ", $s->id(),  "\n";

     print "Foo : ", $s->foo(), "\n";

     print "Bar : ", $s->bar(), "\n";



    That's all you have to to get the data, now to change the data!



     $s->set_bar('NewBar');



    Pretty simple! That's really all there is to it. Set($) returns a

    boolean and a string describing the problem. Lets look at an example of

    what will happen if we try to set a 'Id' which we previously defined as

    read only.



     my ($res, $str) = $s->set_id('2');

     if (! $res) {

       ## Print the error!

       print "$str\n";

     }



    The output will be:



      >> Immutable column



    Currently Set updates the data in the database as soon as you

    call it. In the future I hope to extend ::Record to better support

    transactional operations, such that updates will only happen when "you"

    say so.



    Finally, adding and removing records from the database. ::Record

    provides a Create method which simply takes a hash of key => value

    pairs. The keys exactly map to database columns.



     ## Get a new record object.

     $s1 = Simple->new( handle => $handle );

     my ($id, $status_msg) = $s1->create(id  => 4,

                       foo => 'Foooooo', 

                       bar => 'Barrrrr');



    Poof! A new row in the database has been created! Now lets delete the

    object!



     my $s2 = Simple->new( handle => $handle );

     $s2->load_by_cols(id=>4);

     $s2->delete();



    And it's gone.



    For simple use, that's more or less all there is to it. In the future, I

    hope to expand this how-to to discuss using container classes,

    overloading, and what ever else I think of.



LICENSE

    Jifty::DBI is Copyright 2005-2010 Best Practical Solutions, LLC.

    Jifty::DBI is distributed under the same terms as Perl itself.