Re: has many problems (again)

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G'day Patrik!

You can do it with an AUTOLOAD method in your Item package. Assuming
you've defined your ItemsToContacts package like this:

package ItemsToContacts;
use base 'Foo';
__PACKAGE__->table('ItemsToContacts');
__PACKAGE__->columns(Primary => 'ITEMSTOCONTACTS_ID');
__PACKAGE__->columns(Essential => qw(ITEM_ID CONTACT_ID TYPE));
__PACKAGE__->has_a(ITEM_ID => 'Item');
__PACKAGE__->has_a(CONTACT_ID => 'Contact');

Then the Item package would look like this:

package Item;
use base 'Foo';
use Carp;
our $AUTOLOAD;

__PACKAGE__->table('Item');
__PACKAGE__->columns(Primary => 'ITEM_ID');
__PACKAGE__->columns(Essential => 'ITEM_INFO');

sub AUTOLOAD {
  my $self = shift;
  my $class = ref($self) or croak "$self is not an object";

  my $name = $AUTOLOAD;
  $name =~ s/.*://;

  return (ItemsToContacts->search(ITEM_ID => $self, TYPE =>
$name))[0]->CONTACT_ID;
}

Of course, for proof on concept I'm only returning the FIRST contact
that matches. If you need to handle more than one match you'll need to
return an array of Contact objects or the iterator from the search.

Hope this helps!

On Wed, 2005-07-06 at 16:51 +0200, Patrik Wallstrom wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I am building an application where I have Items and Contacts like
> this:
> 
> package Item;
> __PACKAGE__->columns(Primary => 'ITEM_ID');
> __PACKAGE__->columns(Essential => 'ITEM_INFO');
> 
> package Contact;
> __PACKAGE__->columns(Primary => CONTACT_ID');
> __PACKAGE__->columns(Essential => CONTACT_INFO');
> 
> I also have a table that looks like this:
> 
> ItemsToContacts:
> ITEMSTOCONTACTS_ID
> ITEM_ID
> CONTACT_ID
> TYPE
> 
> where TYPE can be one of "billing", "tech" and "admin".
> 
> What I would like to be able to do is something like this:
> $item->billing->contact_info and
> $item->tech->contact_info
> 
> Do I make things too complicated for myself?
> How would I solve this?
> 
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