[Dbix-class] order by field?

[Peter Rabbitson]

On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 10:53:25AM +0200, Octavian Rasnita wrote:
> From: "Peter Rabbitson" <rabbit+dbic at rabbit.us>
> 
> > On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 11:04:22AM +0100, QE :: Felix Ostmann wrote:
> >> I am doing such a order with the following SQL:
> >> 
> >> ...
> >> ORDER BY
> >>   (department = 'Marketing') DESC,
> >>   (department = 'Sales') DESC,
> >>   (department = 'Financial') DESC,
> >>   (department = 'IT') DESC,
> >>   (department = 'Operations') DESC,
> >>   ...
> >> 
> >> But there is no special way to use this with DBIx::Class :-/
> >> 
> > 
> > Can you elaborate? You can always do:
> > 
> > order_by => \' anything you feel like goes here'.
> > 
> > Is this not sufficient?
> > 
> > Cheers
> > 
> 
> 
> 
> I can do:
> 
> order_by => \'field(department, "Marketing", "Sales", "IT")',
> 
> But the problem is that those names of the departments should be manually cleaned/escaped before inserting them in that script, to avoid SQL injection.
> 

Well - you need to check beforehand anyway if the requested columns are
in fact available. Or are you just letting the RDBMS throw in this case?

> And another problem might be that the syntax above won't be portable to other databases.

But the *concept* itself is not sanely portable to many RDBMS. Hence
giving this technique space in the official API seems unwise.