[Catalyst] Model objects from multiple DBIx::Class rows

[Stephen Shorrock]

Hi Lukas,

Firstly thanks and secondly I take your point regarding the relationships.

It seems sensible that I should create an object to manipulate a
Montage rather than methods attached to other objects that seem to be
modifying something virtual.  For example a Montage might have a
period associated to it so when I display the details the Montage
knowing it's period can identify the pictures from it's period
containing the user that belong to it and maybe on a picture rating
set by the user include them to be displayed.  To always have to pass
start and end dates, and perhaps other Montage related attributes, to
a method in the users object doesn't see right.

Ideally I would wish for the Montage object to have access to all the
objects in the schema where the Montage object can call the CRUD
methods to modify its underlying state.

Does this seem any clearer?

The best way I have at the moment is to have a plain Moose Montage
object that is passed the User object at initialization.  It then can
go away and from the User object and it's relationships populate the
pictures array/resultset, all the montage methods are later at hand to
manipulate for views / controlelrs etc.  I can't put my finger on it
but at the moment something seems slightly amiss with needing  the
dependencies between the plain Moose object and a DBIx::Class schema
object. My feeling is that they don't really need to exist because
without the specific schema it's unlikely that the Montage class would
exist in the same form, and that everything should be in the same
package.  I think that it must be something very basic that I've
overlooking, perhaps in terms of where the class should be located.

Stephen


On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 4:33 PM, Lukas Thiemeier
<spamcatcher at thiemeier.net> wrote:
> Hi Stephen,
>
> As far as I know, creating result class without underlying table is not
> supported.
>
> Having a class without table, but with relationships doesn't realy make
> sense to me. A relationship always has two sides.
>
> I am not sure if I really understand your problem. You have a "user"
> table and a related "picture" table? My approach would be to select the
> user from the user-table, and use "prefetch" to populate the
> pictures-relation with the same call. You will get a $user object with
> the "pictures" relationship already populated.
>
> https://metacpan.org/module/DBIx::Class::ResultSet#prefetch
>
> If you want to update several related tables with a single method call,
> take a look at RecursiveUpdate. It is not the fastest solution, and
> there might be situations where it is not suitable, but it works fine in
> most cases. And it allows you to pass nested hash- and arrayrefs to
> recursive_update, and therefore updating or creating several related
> rows with very little code. For example, HTML::FormHandler uses R-U to
> update the database.
>
> https://metacpan.org/module/DBIx::Class::ResultSet::RecursiveUpdate
>
> It is also possible to create several result classes for the same table,
> if you need different behavior in different situations. You cound, for
> example, create a "Montage" class, which works on the "user" table, and
> add custom code which is only needed by montages. The old "user" class
> will still be available.
>
> cheers, Lukas
>
>
>
> On 11/22/2012 04:59 PM, Stephen Shorrock wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I was wondering whether there is any advice out there about how to use
>> and manage objects within a Catalyst application where the objects
>> contain DBIx::Class schema model objects that are also within the
>> application.
>>
>> I've considered creating simple moose objects that get passed the
>> schema objects and use rows returned from the schema objects to
>> populate 'local' values but this doesn't seem right. The trouble I
>> have is that data for these objects is stored in the database but
>> their i sno single table for the object them selves for example I
>> might have a Montage object that has a $User and several @Pictures the
>> User record is stored in the database and the Picture records are also
>> stored as individual rows in a pictures table. I want to manipulate
>> the users along with their pictures as an object them selves, for
>> example given a User DBIx::class objects create a method (eg
>> get_montage) that returns a Montage.
>>
>> Is there a simple solution perhaps creating a DBIx::class object that
>> doesn't actually have an underlying table but can still utilize
>> relationships and have User::get_montage return an instance of one of
>> these?  Or am I overlooking something else that is obvious?
>>
>> Thanks in advance
>>
>> Stephen
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> List: Catalyst at lists.scsys.co.uk
>> Listinfo: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/catalyst
>> Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk/
>> Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> List: Catalyst at lists.scsys.co.uk
> Listinfo: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/catalyst
> Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk/
> Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/