Re: Database interaction

["A. Pagaltzis" <pagaltzis gmx de>]

* Daniel Kasak <dkasak nusconsulting com au> [2004-04-28 01:24]:
> Thanks for the tips. I've been at this for 7 years now, 5 of
> which I've spent mostly with MySQL. I'm certainly no beginner
> wanting to do a home recipe collection.

No offense, but that's what it sounded like. You gave no
indication of what it really was you were trying to do. Sorry for
the misunderstanding.

> You're missing the point. I want an object that will automate
> the binding of input fields to data in our database.

Aha. Now you're clearer.

> Other way around dude. The database is very much in existance
> already. 

That's not something you mentioned before..

> I then go into glade and create entry fields, and call them:
>
> [...]
>
> Then I add my DB interaction object to the window. When the
> windows opens, I call the 'refresh' method, which looks at it's
> SQL and DB string and fetches the data via DBI. It then looks
> at the list of fields is has, and looks at the fields that are
> on the same window that it's on, and sets their value
> accordingly. See how it saves programming time?

That sounds backwards to me. You haven't automated very much; you
still have to manually create a form for every single table.

If I were to tackle this, I'd write a container widget which is
given a list of fields (and their data types), which then
automatically instantiates suitable widgets for all the fields.

It wouldn't be hard to pass coderefs to do validation for each
field.

> The object has an 'update' method, which will do the opposite.
> It will loop through all fields on the form associated with it
> by name, and run an update command on the DB based on the
> primary key.

A container widget as I described above should probably be
implemented without any database related code at all, in the
interest of reusability. Instead, it should just offer a way to
get the values for all the fields at once.  For applications such
as yours, there are SQL asbtraction modules which can take this
list and munge it into a query.

That would be a way to cleanly separate the GUI from the backend.

Of course, no such widget exists..

-- 
Regards,
Aristotle
 
"If you can't laugh at yourself, you don't take life seriously enough."