Re: [Openinteract-help] lc and searching

[Vsevolod (S. I. <si...@cs...>]

Chris,

>> 1. Why do you lowercase field names? Can this be a configuration 
>> option instead?
> 
> 
> Where is this giving you a problem? I probably did this to ensure that 
> everything was handled consistently internally.

It happens once in SPOPS::Tool::DBI::DiscoverField and a whopping
eight times :) in SPOPS::Tie.

> I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but you can specify join clauses in 
> the fetch_group:
> 
>  my $people = Person->fetch_group({
>    where => "address.city = ? AND person.address_id = address.address_id,
>    from  => [ 'address', 'person' ],
>    value => [ 'Pittsburgh' ],
>  });
> 
> I'll make a change so you don't need to add 'person' (the table of the 
> class we're querying) to the 'from' list. (That's kind of annoying...)

> You can also pass where clauses to the generated links_to method. The 
> attached script is an example (standalone, uses SQLite).

The script is cool (I did not know you could do that :), but my problem 
is similar to your Pittsburgh example. My code looks similar. But if the 
definition of Person has_a Address, it feels redundant to specify the 
"person.address_id = address.address_id" clause. (And the clauses for 
links_to classes are even bulkier.)

I wish I could just automagically say
   my $people = Person->fetch_group({
     where => "city = 'Pittsburg'});

Of course, if more than one dependent class of Person has the 'city' 
field, there has to be a way of choosing the one we need. Perhaps it can 
be prefixed: "address.city='Pittsburg'", where "address" is not the name 
of the table with addresses, but the alias of the address_id field in 
Person. Then the table structure is nicely abstracted away. :)

> Beyond that... the whole links_to/fetch_by stuff has been kind of 
> stagnant for quite some time. It needs to be revisited and perhaps 
> rethought a bit...

I saw the note by Ray Zimmerman mentioned in your documentation and 
already ran into some of its issues with the order of saving of the 
contained classes (for a new object, the has_to classes have to be saved 
first, then their ids should be given to the top-level object, then this 
object should be saved, then its id should be used to save the links_to 
objects).

After I get a bit more familiar with SPOPS, let me know if I can give 
you a hand with this.

Simon

-- 

Simon (Vsevolod ILyushchenko)   si...@cs...
				http://www.simonf.com

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