[Dbix-class] Strangely does DBIx change table names from MySQL?

[Darren Duncan]

On 2017-03-10 9:12 AM, Jorge Gonzalez wrote:
> DBIC by default follows the convention that table names reflect the entity name
> in singular. If It detects table names in plural It uses a Lingua::* module to
> deduce the apropriate singular name, and names the clases with It.
>
> In your case, the table names IS "people", but the generated class name IS
> "Person", the singular for people.

Semantically this is one of those things I would argue that Entity Framework got 
(more) right and DBIC got (more) wrong.

Semantically a table is a collection of rows where typically each row represents 
a singular entity, for example a single person, and a table represents a simple 
set/bag/array of those entities, and is collectively for example a group of 0..N 
people.

I believe table-typed variables such as those in SQL databases should be named 
using the same naming conventions that are appropriate for arrays, after what 
the whole collection represents, such as "people", whereas row-typed variables 
would best be named for what a single row is, such as "person".

As this simple example in SQL (like typical generated SQL) demonstrates:

   select person.name, person.age from people person

Here "people" is the name of the table-typed SQL variable, and "person" is the 
name of the SQL range variable declared in the "select" that represents each 
individual row in turn.

This is a loose Perl analogy:

   for my $person ($db->people) { print $person->name, $person->age }

And so, DBIC would ideally name any classes/objects/variables representing a 
single person as Person while any representing a collection would be People, 
which is the behavior that "code first" Entity Framework defaults to.

-- Darren Duncan