Converting CDBI to DBIC (part 6): Phase 1

In part 5 of this series, the plan for how we're going to do this conversion was laid out. Now, for some actual working code.

The plan for our migration is going to leverage DBIx::Class::ResultSource's result_class attribute. First, some explanation. Unlike every other ORM I know about, DBIC decouples the operations on a group of rows from inflating those rows. This is the whole resultset thing. So, it only makes sense that you would be able to specify how you want to actually go about inflating the rows returned from a search. And DBIC does exactly that.

So, we have a set of CDBI classes. Let's work with one of them called App::CDBI::Foo. In order to make this work, we're going to want to have a corresponding DBIx::Class::ResultSource object. That resultsource object will be registered with our schema object (q.v. DBIC for more info) as handling stuff for the foo table that App::CDBI::Foo used to manage.

In order to get everything to work, we're going to need to tell that resultsource everything that the CDBI class knows. We're also going to have to inject an inflate_result() method into the CDBI class.

my $source = DBIx::Class::ResultSource::Table->new({});

$source->add_columns( $cdbi->columns );

$source->set_primary_key( $cdbi->primary_columns );

*{ $cdbi . '::inflate_result' } = sub {

my $self = shift;

my ($source, $data, $prefetch) = @_;

return $cdbi->construct( $data );

};

$source->result_class( $cdbi );

$schema->register_source( $tablename => $source );

And, that's the basic structure. Unfortunately, there are issues. Some of which I'll deal with in later posts, some of which I can't (because they're your problems).

1. One of the biggest reasons to migrate to DBIC is prefetch. You'll notice that our inflate_result doesn't actually do anything with $prefetch. I'll post a better one later.
2. add_columns() can take a lot more information than CDBI ever stored. You'll want to populate that information somehow.
3. $tablename and other variables appeared out of mid-air. You'll want to fix that. :)
4. This code doesn't actually do anything for things like unique constraints, defining relationships, and the like. You'll want to fix that, too. :)
5. Unless your code is amazingly clean, you probably have snippets like $obj->search(...); You may need an AUTOLOAD to catch those (for now).

And, later on, I'll show you how to migrate your actual objects to DBIx::Class::Row objects from CDBI.