Hi Monks,

In my continuing journey towards Perl Nirvana I started examining the techniques I use for database access and how I pull data into my scripts and write them out. During one of this introspective sessions I started looking at the DBIx:: family of CPAN modules.

Lo and behold I stumbled across DBIx::Table and things looked good. I created a very simple table to work with as such:

create table venue (
   venue_id integer not null auto_increment primary key,
   venue_name  varchar(30) not null 
);
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To "marry" it to DBIx::Table as per the man page I created a module such as:

package venue;
use strict;
use DBIx::Table;
use vars qw / @ISA /;
 
@ISA = qw / DBIx::Table /;
 
sub describe {
  my $self = shift || return undef;
 
  $self->{'table'}='venue';
  $self->{'unique_keys'}=[qw /venue_id/ ];
  $self->{'columns'}= {
                       venue_id => {
                                   'immutable' => 1,
                                   'autoincrement' => 1
                                   },
                       venue_name => {quoted => 1 }
                      };
 
}
1;
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So far so good.

Now comes the time to test it out. One of the first things I want to do is add a new "venue" to my table so I invoke

my $obj2 = create venue(db=>$dbh);
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So far so good. I read the man page and I surmise that I need to now take this "blank" record and do a

$obj2->set({venue_name=>'My New Venue'});

$obj2->commit();
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Doing so I get an error:

A value is required for venue_id in row 0 in order to commit
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Hmmm.. that's interesting given that venue_id is an auto_increment column and immutable. So what the hey...

$obj2->set(change=>{ venue_name => 'newVenue',
                 venue_id=>$new_id});
$obj2->commit();
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Changed the code and re-ran it and got:

Attempt to modify immutable column: venue_id
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as I would have expected. I give up.. how does this thing work? Anybody out there get this to work?