[Dbix-class] RFC: DBIx::Class::JSON

[Matt S Trout]

Nilson Santos Figueiredo Junior wrote:
> On 9/14/06, Dami Laurent (PJ) <laurent.dami at justice.ge.ch> wrote:
>> Well, following all relationships automatically might lead you to
>> dump the whole database ! So the programmer needs a way to specify
>> which relationships should be followed, how deep the recursion will go,
>> etc, but it's not obvious to design a simple yet powerful API for that.
>> I tried to do it with methods 'expand', 'autoExpand' in DBIx::DataModel,
>> but it needs further work to become more flexible.
> 
> It doesn't dump all relationships, it only dumps the ones you explicitely.
> 
> One existing issue is that, as it is, you can't specify arbitrary
> dumping chains. You can only specify first-level relationships or
> "nested" relationships which will always be followed (useful for
> dumping tree like things, where one row might have another row as
> parent and this parent row might have another parent row, etc).

I think what I'd like to see is a general serialization interface that plugins 
can be written for. Something like

__PACKAGE__->load_components(qw/Serializer/);
__PACKAGE__->serialization_options({ follow_rels => ... });

...

$obj->serialize_to('JSON');
$obj->serialize_to('XML');

etc.

How does that look to you guys?

-- 
      Matt S Trout       Offering custom development, consultancy and support
   Technical Director    contracts for Catalyst, DBIx::Class and BAST. Contact
Shadowcat Systems Ltd.  mst (at) shadowcatsystems.co.uk for more information

+ Help us build a better perl ORM: http://dbix-class.shadowcatsystems.co.uk/ +