[SQLObject] Form fields and SQLObject

[<mar...@ge...>]

I am new to Python and SQLObject and I am looking for tips on how to do a search in a web application that uses SQLObject.

For testing/learning purposes I am using the Person class from the SQlObject:
	
from SQLObject import *

class Person(SQLObject):
	_connection = MySQLConnection(host='localhost', db='test', user='*', passwd='*', debug=1)
	
	firstName = StringCol(length=100)
	middleInitial = StringCol(length=1, default=None)
	lastName = StringCol(length=100)

So far I have a findPerson method that looks like this:

def findPerson(self, id, fn, mi, ln):
	persons = Person.select(
						AND(Person.q.firstName.startswith(fn),
							Person.q.middleInitial.startswith(mi),
							Person.q.lastName.startswith(ln)))
	return persons

Where id, fn, mi and ln are the values of the fields in my search form - not very impressive and problematic in many ways I know !

What I would like is to implement a findPerson method that, based on the field values incl. any operators - *, <, >, <=, >= and so on, is able to perform a proper search and return all matching Person objects(rows). I have fiddled around with some inelegant string substitution to ugly to post. Especially properties - in this case middleInitial - that defaults to None, are troublesome, since an empty field is not matched by None.

Is there a elegant preferably generic solution for the above ? by generic I mean somthing that would work irrespective of the specific class.

I am using Python 2.3 on Windows 2000 and SQLObject 0.5.1.

Ian Bicking - super cool tool.

Regards,

Martin

-------------------------------------------------
WebMail fra Tele2 http://www.tele2.dk
-------------------------------------------------