[Dancer-users] Adding quick_insert / quick_update to Dancer::Plugin::Database - design feedback requested

[David Precious]

Hi all,

I'm thinking of adding a couple of convenience features to 
Dancer::Plugin::Database, but I can't seem to decide on a clean 
interface design, and would appreciate any feedback.

I very commonly find myself inserting/updating records in a database, so 
I'd like to provide quick_insert() and quick_update() keywords which 
would work something like:

# Insert a new row into $table
quick_insert($table, { field => 'value', field2 => 'value2' });

# Update the row where the id column is 42:
quick_update($table, { id => 42 }, { field => 'newvalue' });

# Maybe also a way to delete rows quickly:
quick_delete($table, { id => 42 });


The problem is mostly in supporting multiple database connections.

I'm thinking either make quick_insert() and quick_update() accept a 
hashref of named parameters or a list of positional parameters, so in 
the simplest case you could use them as per above, and if you're using 
multiple connections, you could instead say e.g.:

quick_insert({
    connection => 'development',
    table => 'tablename',
    data  => { field => 'value', ... },
});

quick_update({
    connection => 'development',
    table => 'tablename',
    where => { id => 42 },
    data  => { field => 'new value' },
});

What do you think to that?  I'm not particularly keen on it, but it 
would work.

In both cases, you could supply a pre-written WHERE clause as a straight 
scalar, or a set of values as a hashef.  (For most cases, you'd probably 
just use a hashref of e.g. { keycolumn => 'value' }).

The other way I was considering was to allow an optional first param 
which would be the connection name, so e.g.:

# Use the default database details:
quick_insert('tablename', { field => 'value' ... });

# Use a different named connection:
quick_insert('connectionname', 'tablename', { field => 'value' });

That would work, too, but changing the meaning of positional parameters 
feels wrong to me...

Finally, I'm not sure whether to go with quick_insert / quick_update 
etc, or use names which make it clearer that they're database-related, 
like quick_db_update(), or database_quick_update(), or something 
similar.

I'd appreciate anyone's thoughts.

Cheers

Dave P


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