[Catalyst] RFC: Catalyst::Controller::REST::DBIC

[Christopher Laco]

Steve Atkins wrote:
> 
> On May 4, 2008, at 9:02 AM, Christopher Laco wrote:
> 
>>
>>
>> My pet peeve is that /foo/primary_key makes computers happy... but not 
>> people.
>>
>>
>> /products/23
>> /products/ABC-1234
>>
>>
>> The first is the PK for a product record..
>> The second is the actual sku for a product... just a unique as the 
>> pk...but not the PK itself...
>>
>>
>> Now what does "id" mean in this case?
>> What id your SKU is a numeric just like your PK?
>>
>> Two different and equally useful ways to get at the same resource.
>>
>> If you're talking about an interface where humans know the skus, and 
>> computers know the id (restfully and/or remotely).. you need a sane uri:
>>
>> /products/id/<id>
>> /products/sku/<sku>
>>
>> In the end, I always run into a situation where humans (think 
>> marketing SEO pushers who know not of REST) want something other than 
>> a true restful uri.
> 
> Part of the problem here might be the wish to avoid a natural
> primary key in the database schema, preferring a synthetic
> primary key even when there's a perfectly good natural
> primary key.
> 
> That's something that I expect to see from the ruby on
> rails crowd, not the (presumably more pragmatic) perl folks.
> 
> If your SKU is unique, then it's a perfectly good primary
> key, and having a synthetic numeric primary key isn't
> necessary. 

Not really. SKU is unique yes, but it can change (renamed, reconfigured 
when companies merge, etc) for the same physical product. It's a poor PK 
for the purposes of joining records to it, but a great key for the 
purposes of lookup and selling the item.

One could argue that UPC is a better key than sku, but that's not very 
friendly.

-=Chris