Gentlemonks,

I am thinking about an Entity Bean package. I'm sure someone has written a CPAN module for this already. Something not unlike Tie::DBI, or actually more like Class::DBI.

What am I thinking of? A package that streamlines the creation of objects from rows in a database.

For example, I'm managing a configuration table... call it CONFIG. It has columns like this: 
   location_id (primary key)
   local_dir
   file_pattern
   count_method
   log_level
   production
   destinations
   archive
So, I'm writing a Perl package that accepts a database handle and a primary key, queries the db, and populates its fields appropriately, when I got to idly thinking that all this should already be done for me. But where? And how?

Perl isn't magic. Any package that automated this kind of process would still have to know what columns to query and where to put them. Or perhaps I'm thinking about it backwards. The target class has a table name and a list of column names, and feeds them to the automation package -- which could have the database handle. Fine. Then perhaps it also has a place to store the data once retrieved. Well, of course it does: the class has access methods. So how about I name those methods the same as the column names... ok. Then the automation package does a SELECT, then calls the target class' methods to load the column values in.

Surely this kind of thing has already been done. So does anyone know the name of the package? I must be overlooking something obvious (like tie, or something).

Thanks,
Rob

In reply to Perl Entity Bean by rje

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