[Catalyst] RFC: Would this be useful to anyone?

[John Napiorkowski]

I have a version of Catalyst::Model::DBIC::Schema where I hacked in some code to automatically look at the query string and perform some limits and sorting.  Basically if it sees a something like:

...?[table].page=1&[table].max-results=10&[table].order-by=[column].[direction]

It will automatically create a new resultset object with the correct limits.  It can also do (very unoptimized) searches with something like

...?[table].search=[text to search in the table]

I'm adding in the ability to set a start and end range, as well with something like

...?[table].start-index=10&[table].end-index=100

I was wondering if the community thinks this could be useful, or if it would be more useful in some other state.  I know that this kind of resultset limiting is something I do all the time and I assume it's the case for others.

Right now I have this integrated with my Schema classes, as I mentioned above, but I am not sure it's the best thing to do.  Although it will DWIM when I do $c->Model('table') it doesn't help me if that resultset has one to many relationships that also need to be limited.  So I have this also as a DBIC component in order to handle this for me.

I was thinking perhaps we'd prefer to have this as a separate model that you'd pass a resultset and a $c->request to to get the limited resultset, instead of so much magic:

my $fullrs = $c->Model('Table');
$c->forward($c->Model('LimitResultSet'), [$fullrs, $c->request]);

## Now $fullrs has been limited as described above

I was thinking to use $c->forward because I tend to use forward when I am implementing a command or pipeline style design pattern, but this could also easily be:

my $fullrs = $c->Model('Table');

my $pagedrs = $c->Model('LimitResultSet')->build($fullrs, $c->request)


Or something similar If people preferred:

Then again maybe it would just be better to keep it as a raw DBIC component:

my $pagedrs = $fullrs->search_by_query($c->request);

This would have the benefit of working reasonally well will people using CGI.pm outside of Catalyst.  This is sort of what I am doing now, I have a component and my hacked Catalyst model calls it to save myself a bit of trouble.  The only


Any thoughts?

BTW, one thing that is making this hard for me to make cross database is that in the full text search Postgres requires ILIKE to make the search case insensitive, unlike ever other database.  Right now in my DBIC code I do:

        foreach my $keyword ( split(/\s/, $value) ) 
        {
            my @keywords = split(',', $keyword);
            
            push @array, [
            
                -or => [ {$column => {'ILIKE' => [ map { '%'.$_.'%' } @keywords ]} } ],
            ];
        }

to build the correct data structure for searching.  Does anyone out there know if there is a neat cross database way to do this, or do I need to explicitly check for Postgres and use ILIKE instead of like?

--john





 
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