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

[Zbigniew Lukasiak]

Hi there,

This is a frequently recurring conversation - so I created a wiki page
to gather all the points where we reached some consensus:
http://catwiki.toeat.com/crud.  For the start I just dumped my
opinions.  I tried to be not controversial - but it is a wiki - if you
don't agree then you can edit it and make it more acceptable for you.

I am especially waiting for people with opinions on the REST and
browser REST part - I have got much knowledge in that area.

Cheers,
Zbigniew

On Sun, May 4, 2008 at 2:38 AM, luke saunders <luke.saunders at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have started to write a Catalyst base controller for REST style CRUD
> via DBIC. I have noticed that a number of other people have been
> working on or are thinking about working on something similar, most
> notabley J. Shirley who seems to be creating
> Catalyst::Controller::REST::DBIC::Item
> (http://dev.catalystframework.org/svnweb/Catalyst/browse/Catalyst-Controller-REST-DBIC-Item/)
> and some chaps from a recent thread on this list (entitled
> "Dispatching with Chained vs HTTP method").
>
> Ideally I would like to merge J. Shirley's effort into mine (or visa
> versa) along with anything that anyone else has. Basically I want to
> avoid ending up with a load of modules that all do the same thing.
>
> My effort is heavily based on something mst wrote a while ago, and
> since then I've ended up writing something very similar for every
> project I've worked on which indicates it's worth OSing. Essentially
> it is used like so:
>
>  package MyApp::Controller::API::REST::CD;
>
>  use base qw/Catalyst::Controller::REST::DBIC/;
>
>  ...
>
>  __PACKAGE__->config
>    ( action => { setup => { PathPart => 'cd', Chained =>
> '/api/rest/rest_base' } },
>      class => 'RestTestDB::CD',
>      create_requires => ['artist', 'title', 'year' ],
>      update_allows => ['title', 'year']
>      );
>
> And this gets you the following endpoints to fire requests at:
>    /api/rest/cd/create
>    /api/rest/cd/id/[cdid]/update
>    /api/rest/cd/id/[cdid]/delete
>    /api/rest/cd/id/[cdid]/add_to_rel/[relation]
>    /api/rest/cd/id/[cdid]/remove_from_rel/[relation]
>
> The full source is here:
> http://lukesaunders.me.uk/dists/Catalyst-Controller-REST-DBIC-1.000000.tar.gz
>
> If you have a few moments please have a look, especially if you are
> working on something similar. Today I even wrote a test suite which
> has a test app and is probably the best place to look to see what it
> does.
>
> Note that it lacks:
> - list and view type methods which dump objects to JSON (or whatever)
> - clever validation - it should validate based on the DBIC column
> definitions but it doesn't
> - any auth - not sure if it should or not, but it's possible
>
> Also it doesn't distinguish between POST, PUT, DELETE and GET HTTP
> requests favouring instead entirely separate endpoints, but that's up
> for discussion.
>
> So, J. Shirley, do you have any interest in a merge? And others, do
> you have ideas and would you like to contribute?
>
> Thanks,
> Luke.
>
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-- 
Zbigniew Lukasiak
http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/