[rt-devel] DBIx::Searchbuilder woes

[Robie Basak]

On Thu, 2002-08-22 at 19:28, Michael Grubb wrote:

[...]

> Just remember that Limit method calls really just append 'AND|OR Field =
> VALUE' to the WHERE clause of a query.  and of course you can do things such
> as Like by setting the OPERATOR key in the parameter hash to 'LIKE'

One question here though; what about brackets? As in if I wanted to
do x OR (y AND z) then does it get interpreted as (x OR y) AND z? Or am
I just expected to know the SQL well enough to write the query in the
correct order?

The "correct" way of doing this would be to define the ENTRYAGGREGATOR
as (say) postfix, so that to do the former you'd call x, y, z, AND, OR
and the latter x, y, OR z, AND (reverse-polish) or something similarly
well-defined. But the current API doesn't give that flexibility.

So I'm suggesting something like:

$MyTickets->LimitRequestor(VALUE =>
$session{'CurrentUser'}->EmailAddress);
$MyTickets->LimitCc(VALUE => $session{'CurrentUser'}->EmailAddress);
$MyTickets->Limit(ENTRYAGGREGATOR => 'OR');

Or, for my x, y and z examples above, for (x or (y and z)):

$MyTickets->LimitX(...);
$MyTickets->LimitY(...);
$MyTickets->LimitZ(...);
$MyTickets->Limit(ENTRYAGGREGATOR => 'AND');
$MyTickets->Limit(ENTRYAGGREGATOR => 'OR');

or for ((x or y) and z):
$MyTickets->LimitX(...);
$MyTickets->LimitY(...);
$MyTickets->Limit(ENTRYAGGREGATOR => 'OR');
$MyTickets->LimitZ(...);
$MyTickets->Limit(ENTRYAGGREGATOR => 'AND');

This is a non-ambiguous, fairly standard and widespread way of doing it,
and the way I think it "should" work. I'd say that this should be a new
method of doing it in terms of the API (which will require changes to
the code, obviously) and the old method should be deprecated.

What do people think of this?

> You are very right about the documentation of DBIx::SearchBuilder though.
> I built an application unrelated to RT on top of it.  I think it is a great
> library, but it is a bear to learn.  The way I figured it out was by
> examining nearly all of the RT modules and examing the DBIx::SearchBuilder
> code indepth, however this is not so bad because Jesse codes better than most
> perl programmers.

I agree with you completely; Jesse's code is great :)

I've made a huge number of modifications to RT, all of which I've only
been able to do because I can grok the code very easily and very
quickly.

Unfortunately most of them have at least some element of hack and so I'm
reluctant to contribute them, but I am busy cleaning things up so
hopefully things which I think might be useful to others will filter
through :)

Robie.