I finally found the time to play around with this over the past few days, and I very much hope that others make the time to do so.
The first module that I tried to look at was Serials.pm, since I did some work on it relatively recently. What I found immediately is that none of the relations were auto-discovered by the schema generator. I am guessing that this reveals a lack of fk defs in our base schema in this module. While this may seem like a real pain, and seem to raise the bar, so to speak, in terms of the amount of effort required to adopt an ORM, I think that investing the time now in firming up and fixing Koha's base schema will be well worth it in the long term. One of the things I really like about what I've seen in DBIx::Class is that once you define the relationships properly in your schema object, getting at the data you want becomes pretty easy. Joins are handled for you by the abstraction layer itself. This will only work if some of the shortcomings of Koha's core schema are addressed, however. If they aren't, then we'll end up passing all sorts of modifiers to our Schema objects in order to compensate, in which case we may as well just be writing SQL. So my feeling is that the power and advantage of DBIx::Class can only be taken advantage of if some of our problematic db schema issues are addressed as a part of this work. Once this is addressed, I think this will really clean up core Koha modules, and allow the RDBMS to take care of the things that it's good at taking care of, and give us code simplification and multi-db support at once. In short, I'm highly in favor of pursuing this, with the caveat that we have a bit of cleanup to do in the process. An interesting line of thought is whether one might approach this 'cleanup' (i.e. properly defining pks, fks & table relations) from the POV of the db schema itself, or from the POV of the db abstraction layer. Obviously, it's harder to do it from the abstraction layer for an extant schema, but it can be approached from either direction. I hope that others get a chance to apply these patches and offer some feedback. I'd like to see this implemented. Regards, Ryan On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 3:53 AM, Henri-Damien LAURENT <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote: > Hi andrew. > Thanks for your hard work. > I will try and test this. > I hope that Marc will have some time to this too. > let's stay tuned. > -- > Henri-Damien LAURENT > _______________________________________________ > Koha-devel mailing list > Koha-devel@lists.koha.org > http://lists.koha.org/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel > -- Ryan Higgins LibLime * Open-Source Solutions for Libraries Featuring KohaZOOM ILS 888-564-2457 x704
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