Re: [SQLObject] Generic "find" & findOne method

[Ian B. <ia...@co...>]

Carlos Ribeiro wrote:
> It turns out that Ian's time machine is almost as good as Guido's one.
> There *is* a find() method on the current SQLObject; it's called
> selectBy and it's not documented anywhere else. I only found it today
> while looking for something else. BTW, I admit being ashamed about it
> :-(
> 
> Now, just out of curiosity: is selectBy undocumented just for lack of
> time, or is it because it's not recommended?

Forgetfulness.  I've added a note to the svn docs.

With reference to the rest of the discussion -- I don't like the findOne 
function, because it throws things away.  I'd rather it raise an error 
when more than one record was found; I don't think there's a use case 
for throwing rows away, it's just easy to implement.  In most cases 
alternateID fills the role of select-one, though another way of doing 
this might be useful.  Actually, I think it's mostly useful because of 
the error issue.  If you implement ad hoc findOne-like methods, you'll 
probably throw away extra columns.  Maybe it could be a method for 
SelectResult methods, like:

inst = MyTable.selectBy(...).getOne()

But I don't like "getOne" as a method name.


SQL injection won't be a problem, since we do all the necessary quoting 
-- that's part of the point of SQLObject and SQLBuilder, after all.  You 
only have to be sure that all your columns are "public", more or less, 
since a person might be able to inject their own form variables.  But 
it's also easy to test that your keys are limited to a specific set of 
columns.

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ia...@co...  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org