[Catalyst] Template::Provider::DBI and Catalyst

[Bill Moseley]

On Tue, Feb 13, 2007 at 11:02:21AM +0100, Tobias Kremer wrote:
> Following up on a recent post to the list concerning templates in the database
> I'm wondering what the current status of Template::Provider::DBI is and if
> anyone is using it in production within Catalyst? I just found out that it
> seems to be incompatible with Catalyst::View::TT::ForceUTF8, for example
> (ForceUTF8 seems to ignore LOAD_TEMPLATES. Haven't looked at its source code
> yet to tell what's going on).

I'm using Postgresql and the DBD sets the utf8 flag, and I explicitly
decode_utf8 when needed so I have not found that I needed to use ForceUTF8.


> Looking at the source of Template::Provider::DBI I see that the database handle
> is stored within the object which AFAIK is created once during server start by
> my View class initialization. I was told that storing database handles in
> objects for subsequent queries should be avoided by any means. Of course it
> could just be me who got burnt doing this under mod_perl :)

Plus, you won't know if the handle is re-created at some point.  I'm
using CDBI so I get my handle from my model class each time I fetch
from the database.

What I wanted is an easy way to override Template::Provider -- where
the provider would still provide all the normal features and caching
but just allow me to specify a different template store.  I did this
by adding two methods _template_mtime() to get the last modified time
of the template, and _fetch_content() to, well, fetch the template
content.

So I have an App::Template::Provider that overrides the default
Provider and just includes those two methods.

Adding those two methods required a bit of rewriting of
Template::Provider so I now have my own Template::Provider in keep
in my App's lib directory:

    http://hank.org/Provider.pm
    http://hank.org/Provider.diff  (against cvs two days ago)

Should be a drop-in replacement for the default provider.





-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley at hank.org