I've been thinking about POOP a lot lately.

I'm looking to pick a RDBMS-OO mapper to use as a standard tool for (most) of my projects, and I am pretty sure that Class::DBI is the way I want to go. But one thing bothers me, how do you handle inheritance in Class::DBI (or other POOPy modules, if you have one that you really like)?

Consider a class hierarchy with three classes: Host, MailServer and WebServer.

Class: Host
Properties: ID, name, IPAddress, location, OS

Class: MailServer ISA Host
Properties: MTA, version

Class: WebServer ISA Host
Properties: httpd, version, CGI

How do I go about structuring my database for this? What if I want to have a method in Host that can return a list of all hosts (including WebServers, MailServers, and other subclasses of Host) that match some criteria? Must I keep each subclass in a separate table? Is there some obvious solution that I am missing?


TGI says moo

In reply to Inheritance, Class::DBI and POOP by TGI

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