Re: [Poop-group] Auto-populating Class::DBI objects

[Darren D. <darren@DarrenDuncan.net>]

I suggest that since you are explicitely declaring a class (director_xref) which implements the many-to-many relationship between 'movie' and 'director', you do not need to tell Class::DBI about the many-to-many thing generically.  For example, try this:

package DVD::movie;
use base 'DVD::DBI';
__PACKAGE__->set_up_table('movie');

package DVD::director;
use base 'DVD::DBI';
__PACKAGE__->set_up_table('director');

package DVD::director_xref;
use base 'DVD::DBI';
__PACKAGE__->table('director_xref');
__PACKAGE__->columns(Primary => qw/movie director/);
__PACKAGE__->has_a(movie => 'DVD::movie');
__PACKAGE__->has_a(director => 'DVD::director');

That should be all you need, and it is also more like what you would do if you were working closer to the actual database yourself.

One more thing; I suggest naming the third table 'director_movie' or 'movie_director' instead of using 'xref', which is too generic; eg, what would you do under your existing setup for a name if you added a third primary item which has a many-to-many relationship with 'director'?  My suggestion gets around that, and it is more descriptive to what is actually in the table.

-- Darren Duncan