[Solar-talk] Changes afoot: a new Model class

[Paul M Jones]

On Feb 7, 2007, at 5:04 PM, Rodrigo Moraes wrote:

> On 2/7/07, Paul M Jones wrote:
>> The work is nowhere near complete, esp. when it comes to save() and
>> related objects, but it's good enough to start talking about and get
>> feedback on.  Let me know what you think.
>
> Hey Paul,
> I'm amazed looking at the classes, and a bit sad because I spent the
> last week updating my models and forms relationships etc, but this
> sadness is for a good cause. :)

Yeah, I'm very very sorry to cause sadness.  I hate breaking  
stuff.  :-(  But this (very major) change is based on working with  
Table/Row/Rowset for over a year in production environments, and it  
encapsulates those experiences.  I think the changes will be for the  
better, even though painful.

And like I said, it's nowhere near done; it still needs a lot of  
work.  So your current tables/forms/etc are still needed in the mean  
time.  Hope that helps to ease the blow a bit.


> It was funny to see Solar_Inflect committed because a couple of days
> before, Andreas, Antti and I were discussing models and we three
> agreed (correct me if I'm wrong) that inflectors for singular/plural
> could be avoided; we were referring to Rails/Cake/these kind of
> inflectors; the idea would be to, let's say, use singular every time
> and forget to worry about converting to plural / maintaining this kind
> of code.

No, you're right, if there's some way to avoid it I'd like to.  I've  
seen similar conversations on the web about Rails and Cake and the  
naming.  There are options in place to let you pick the column names  
and aliases, so if you want singulars or plurals, you can have them.   
(At least that's the intent. :-)

Having said that, if you have a "to-many" relationship, it would make  
sense to me that you'd ask for (say) $node->comments, not $node- 
 >comment.  And if you have a "to-one" relationship, it seems that a  
singular version makes sense ($node->area).  So there has to be a way  
to swap between the two in an automated way, so you're not required  
to specify each time what the names should be.

Hope that helps to explain my intent, happy to hear more on the  
inflection stuff.



--

Paul M. Jones  <http://paul-m-jones.com>

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