Class::DBI and stalinesque hiding of THE TRUTH

[Andy Wardley]

Simon Wistow wrote:
> Is there a clever way I can do this using cunning trickery? Possibly 
> views or something. My DB skills are, at present, as weak as a kitten on 
> Ludes who's also in traction and wasn't particularly strong in the first 
> place and used to get sand kicked in its face by other, larger kittens 
> when down at the kitten beach.
> 
> I eagerly await the fruits of your exceptional cleverity.

Forgive me if I'm mistaking obvious bleeding for exceptional 
cleverityness but can you not just create two different CDBI 
abstractions (aka "views") of the underlying database?

For example, you have a RegularEntity class and an ExtraSpecialEntity 
class which implements slightly different behavior (your choice as to 
how, that's a mere implementation issue).  It shouldn't matter a jot if 
they happen to point at the same database table, implement the same 
public interfaces, or otherwise.  That's the beauty of abstraction.

FrontEndOne displays RegularEntities while FrontEndTwo displays 
ExtraSpecialEntities and neither end should know nor care how any of the 
entities relate to each other (other than by what they expose in their 
public interfaces).  For that is the way of the model, and not the way 
of the view.  Nor is it the way of any kittens that happen to be hanging 
around with the view on the off-chance that it throws them a piece of 
fish or offers to take them for a day out on Kitten Beach.

My apologies if I have failed to understand the true nature of your 
dilemma and have grasped the stick by the end that the stick designer 
did not intend for it to be grabbed by.  In which case I prostrate 
myself upon Kitten Beach and await the kicking of sand in my stupid 
little kitten face.

A