[Maypole] the subtleties of many-to-many stringification

[Seth Gordon]

>>...and everything Just Worked, except for one small detail: the 
>>"authors" list on the ...library/titles/view/#### page just has the 
>>authors' names, and not the relationships.
>>
> 
> 
> Isn't this what you want since you looking at the title already?

If a book is *written by* Smith and *edited by* Jones, the 
title_author_rel table will record "by" and "ed.", respectively, in the 
relationship field.

When I do my funky dance with JeevesLibrary::TitleAuthorRel::process, a 
titles/view page will show me

GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL
...
Authors
* by Smith
* ed. Jones

whereas if I just set up all the relationships in their default 
fashions, I get

GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL
...
Authors
* Smith
* Jones

>>(a) why I can't add :Exported methods, dammit

Aha!  It has to do with the order of module loading.  (All of my model 
classes are in the JeevesLibrary.pm file, which may be a contributing 
factor.)  If I wrap the call to JeevesLibrary->setup in a BEGIN block, 
then I can add the exported methods.

Now I can implement a search method.....

>>(b) if there is a more elegant way to do the same thing
>>
> 
> 
> Do the object switcheroo in the view Template instead, maybe or just modify the
> template.

Hmm.  My gut feeling is that this kind of mangling should stay in the 
model, but I'm not sure I can really justify that as more than a 
pedantic desire to see how much I can do without touching the default 
templates.

I suspect that the OO-philosophically-ideal way to handle this would be 
to create a new subclass of Class::DBI::Relationship -- perhaps calling 
it Class::DBI::Relationship::HasAWithQualifier -- and use that to 
describe the relationship between title_author_rel and authors.

> Isn't authors an array possibly? I can't see how view template handles that as
> it seems to print the column. Does TT2 automatically print all elements of
> array? 

One-to-many relationships in the "view" page are handled by the 
view_related macro, which the view template calls.

-- 
// seth gordon // sethg@ropine.com // http://dynamic.ropine.com/yo/ //