[Catalyst] Using Catalyst on MS SQL DB that has tables with no primary keys

[Kieren Diment]

And this answer demonstrates perfectly to your managers that their conception of 'database' is broken. 

--
Sent from my phone, so apologies for any spelling errors, brevity, etc. 

On 15/09/2012, at 12:38, Darren Duncan <darren at darrenduncan.net> wrote:

> Brian Katzung wrote:
>> If I recall correctly, I read in a cookbook somewhere (can't seem to find it now) that for rows with no primary key, you can use:
>> __PACKAGE__->set_primary_key(__PACKAGE__->columns);
>> (making the entire row be a multi-column primary key).
> 
> Well that is indeed how things should work; when there is no primary or unique key explicitly defined, there should be an implicit one ranging over all the columns.  However, SQL doesn't work that way and would allow duplicate rows, and so then the question is what behavior do you expect your Perl layer to have?  If you edit a duplicate row, is it supposed to change all copies or just one? -- Darren Duncan
> 
>> On 2012-09-14 14:53, Derek W wrote:
>>> Ah, you meant just on Catalyst side, to tell it that the id column is
>>> the primary.  I didn't think of that.  Thanks!  I'll give that a shot.
>>> 
>>> On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 11:40 AM, Robert Wohlfarth
>>> <rbwohlfarth at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 1:31 PM, Derek W <derekwrobel at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> Thanks, I figured that would probably fix it, but the problem is I am
>>>>> not allowed to make any changes to the DB structure itself.  I suppose
>>>>> I need to convince them why it's in the best interest to have a
>>>>> primary key...
>>>>> 
>>>> You can set the primary key in the schema file. For example, add a line like
>>>> __PACKAGE__->set_primary_key( "id" ); to lib/MyApp/Schema/Result/MyTable.pm.
>>>> You do not need to change the database. DBIx::Class will then use id
>>>> whenever it wants a primary key.
>>>> 
>>>> -- 
>>>> Robert Wohlfarth
> 
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