Re: new version of perl-ldap-0.20 (fwd)

[Graham B. <gb...@po...>]

On Mon, Aug 14, 2000 at 10:54:53PM +0100, John Berthels wrote:
> 
> > This email is highlighting more than one issue. Lets break it into parts and
> > see what we can develop
> > 
> >  1) Net::LDAP::Entry
> >
> > In the case of 1) lets list what we should be able to do with an Entry and
> > what a newbie would probably expect. Then compare that with what an expert
> > would expect/need. It may not be that different.
> 
> Getting data simply
> ===================
> 
> This feels too indirect:
> 
> 	my $msg = $l->search( ... );
> 	my @entries = $msg->entries();
> 	foreach my $entry ( @entries ) {

> 		my $attrs = $entry->get( "cn" );
> 		my $cn = shift @$attrs;	# Take first

That is what we have now, but I am not sure it is what most would expect
when the entry is single-valued, which is probably the most common case.

It also leads to ugly code like 

  my $cn = ($entry->get( "cn" ) || [])->[0];

which is even worse.

After some thinking I am coming to the idea that is used by DBI. That is
that there are several methods with different return type. For example
DBI has fetchrow and fetchrow_arrayref, I am thinking we have
get and get_arrayref. Get will always return a list of values, non-existant
attributes will have to be tested with ->exists

Graham.