Re: [Openinteract-dev] SPOPS fields names and case-sensitivity

[Chris W. <ch...@cw...>]

On Wed, 2002-10-02 at 11:02, Ray Zimmerman wrote:
> We are running into some problems due to the way that SPOPS handles 
> field names. Specifically, it appears that keys($obj) always returns 
> a lower-case version of the actual field names, rather than the case 
> used in the configuration. Also, the db_discover_types() method in 
> SQLInterface returns a hash whose keys are the lower-cased field 
> names.
>
> Is there a good reason for this?  It seems like a bug to me.

The reason, of course, is laziness: I don't want to deal with dissonance
between what the database and the user thinks fields should be named. So
I just lowercase everything when dealing with fields.

For instance, what happens if a person does this?

config: {
   class => 'My::Foo',
   field => [ 'FOO', 'BAR', 'BAZ' ],
}

but as a result of a query to get the field names and types the database
returns:

 NAME   TYPE
 foo    SQL_VARCHAR,
 bar    SQL_INTEGER
 baz    SQL_TIMESTAMP

It's no problem when the user accesses fields, SPOPS::Tie takes care of
this:

 my $obj = My::Foo->fetch( 'quux' );
 print "Foo is: $obj->{FOO} $obj->{bar} $obj->{bAz}\n";

But when we do an insert/update we want to match up the fields with
their types, so we do something like:

 my $fields = $class->field_list;
 # $fields = [ 'FOO', 'BAR', 'BAZ' ]
 my $dbi_types = $class->db_discover_types;
 # keys \%dbi_types = ( 'foo', 'bar', 'baz' )
 foreach my $field ( @{ $fields } ) {
    my $field_type = $dbi_types->{ $field }; # uh oh, type not found!
 }

As a result, I don't know if we can change the return value of
'db_discover_types', but I think we can change the return value of 'keys
%{ $obj }' without too much difficulty.

Well now that I think about it... maybe we can make the return of
'db_discover_types' a tied hash as well. Unless, of course, you've got
something else up your sleeve :-)

Chris

-- 
Chris Winters (ch...@cw...)
Building enterprise-capable snack solutions since 1988.