[Dbix-class] Moose wrapper around DBIC

[Moritz Onken]

Hi,

the latest discussion about using Moose and DBIC got me thinking and I
started a little proof of concept project.
It's called MooseX:DBIC. It contains a MooseX::DBIC::Schema class which is
a subclass of DBIx::Class::Schema.

The idea is to have a layer which takes Moose classes and generates a dbic
schema, including column information and relationships.

package User;
use Moose;
has [qw(first last email password)] => ( is => 'rw', isa => 'Str' );

sub talk { 'Hello' }

and load this class in the schema:

package MySchema;
use Moose;
extends 'MooseX::DBIC::Schema';
__PACKAGE__->load_classes('User');

This will create the following classes:

MySchema::DBIC::User (which isa DBIx::Class ResultSource class)
and
MySchema::User (which isa "User" and does MooseX::DBIC::Result)

inflate_result in MySchema::DBIC::User is extended to return a
MySchema::User object instead of MySchema::DBIC::User. And MySchema::User
has an attribute "dbic_result" which is set to the dbic result row object.

MySchema::User inherits from "User" and can be extended by a custom role to
change column_info and more dbic related stuff.
MooseX::DBIC::Result adds proxy methods to MySchema::User (i.e.
create/update/delete) which update the dbic result object.

Example:

my $user = $schema->resultset('User')->create({ first => 'foo' });
# $user isa User, does MooseX::DBIC::Result
$user->talk; # Hello

It works well so far, but obviously a lot of things are still missing. One
nice feature I implemented is subclassing. Imagine a class Admin which
extends User and has some additional attributes. MooseX::DBIC::Schema will
create two tables and the relationship admin has_one user.

I just wanted to collect some opinions about this idea. If someone comes up
with a good argument why this is retarded, please tell so I can stop
wasting my time on this.

cheers,
mo