[Dbix-class] Getting numeric columns as numeric values

[Peter Rabbitson]

On 02/26/2015 12:30 AM, Augustus Saunders wrote:
> Seems a little backwards to create a helper to work around a core defect. This is something that should work transparently, and is very simple to do so.

You are correct in your overall diagnosis, you are incorrect wrt the 
detail and the solution.

The problem is that DBIC "touches" some of the values returned from the 
DBD (even something as innocuous as $something->{$column_value} is 
enough to break the assumptions of a naive serializer).

The solution is to eliminate all these instances, and definitively not 
introducing expensive operations on every single value retrieval. Some 
work has been planned for this, but an audit of all code paths is 
decidedly not an easy task (and having an incomplete fix in this case is 
worse than not having any at all).

For the time being if you need proper *dependable* numeric semantics you 
should use the ::Row::NumifyGet helper as suggested, until its 
documentation is updated with 'DBIC now does this automatically'.

Cheers