From jproctor at marlboro.edu Fri Oct 11 21:39:59 2002 From: jproctor at marlboro.edu (J Proctor) Date: Thu Aug 5 00:18:41 2004 Subject: code style/data structure questions Message-ID: I'm developing an rdb structure with a couple dozen tables (so far), and a need to do CGI-driven show table/show record detail/add record/edit record operations on a handful of them. All of those operations require multiple, occasionally complex joins, though, and the various detail pages require joins through a cross-reference table instead of a simple foreign key. So I started modeling the db structure, and including in the model information about the 'views' I expect for each table, which columns to show, in which order, and with what formatting. My "show table" script just gets the name of the table as an argument (for example, "show.cgi?table=plasmids") and it calls the table-generator method on the control object with that as an argument. This method (via many private methods it calls) generates the SQL, executes it, applies any special formatting, and spits out a complete HTML table for me. Sounds cool? I hope? I've been working solo too long; it's time to take a step back and make sure I'm on track. One of the data structures I've developed is so contorted I could barely get my brain around it today. So I took a couple hours this afternoon and typed up some notes and questions in hopes of soliciting a little feedback from other programmers. Warning: proceed at your own risk if you're not already familiar with database programming and OO Perl. So, my collected thoughts are at http://persons.marlboro.edu/~jproctor/dw.html At least one person has already asked for a small example (trust me, you don't want 60 kB of code). I'll probably add that over the weekend. Thoughts/comments/suggestions/questions welcome. Thanks. j