[Catalyst] Is C::M::CDBI::Plain deprecated? (ignore previous post)

[Brian Kirkbride]

(Apologies for the repost, I had word-wrap off for the initial one)

Hello all,

I've been watching this project for a long time and have been amazed at the speed 
and quality of the development.  Many thanks to the people devoting their time to 
such a great framework.

I am in the process of porting an app to Catalyst from a simple framework of my own.  
I have a number of existing Class::DBI models that I want to reuse and it looked 
like C::M::CDBI::Plain was the way to do that:

          # FROM THE POD
          # use existing CDBI classes within Catalyst:
          package MyApp::Model::Artist; # a Catalyst class
          use base qw[Catalyst::Model::CDBI::Plain Some::Other::Artist];
          1; # That's it

This however, did not work for me at all.  Mysterious behavior like updates not 
happening, has_a not working, etc.  After pulling out my hair and examining/
disabling the CDBI object index I found the cause of the problem.  It actually 
has to do with the multiple inheritance and Class::Data::Inheritable I believe.

If C::M::CDBI::Plain is in @ISA before Some::Other::Artist, class data from the 
existing class (like __grouper) is not seen.  This is because 
MyApp::Model::Artist->__grouper will be the inherited (and useless) 
Class::DBI->__grouper.  So I switched to:

          use base qw[Some::Other::Artist Catalyst::Model::CDBI::Plain];

Now a test of MyApp::Model::Artist->__grouper does indeed return 
Some::Other::Artist->__grouper as desired.  But, of course, this is not going to 
work inside of Catalyst because MyApp::Model::Artist->new() will be the inherited 
and deprecated Class::DBI->new() instead of the C::M::CDBI::Plain->new() that 
calls Catalyst::Base->new().

My 5am, coffee-list solution was the rather inelegant:

          package MyApp::Model::Artist;
          use base qw/ Some::Other::Artist /;
          use MyApp::MakeModel;
          1;

          package MyApp::MakeModel;
          use Exporter 'import';
          our @EXPORT = qw/ new /;
          sub new {
              my $class = shift;
              $class->Catalyst::Model::new(@_);
          }
          sub import {
              require Catalyst::Model;
              my $model_class = caller(0);
              push @{"$model_class\::ISA"}, 'Catalyst::Model';
              goto &Exporter::import;
          }
          1;

This works perfectly so far, but is hideous and the inheritance introduced is not 
obvious when looking at MyApp::Model::Artist.  Ideally I'd just place MakeModel 
after the existing model in the "use base" clause.  But I don't know a way to get 
a "use base"'d class to export a method off the top of my head.

So the questions at the end of all of it are:

Is anyone using C::M::CDBI::Plain?
If not is it deprecated or not-working?  
Is there an easier/better way to do this?
 
I've seen discussion questioning the usefulness of making your models Cat 
components, but I want to for cleanliness and to do $c->model('Artist').  I have 
started experimenting with a Modelize plugin that takes a list of classes and 
turns them into models the same way that MyApp::MakeModel does above.  Would that
be a (somewhat) cleaner solution?


Thanks again for such a lively development effort, it's been fun following it.

- Brian Kirkbride