[Maypole] when dynamic method generation is not your friend

[Seth Gordon]

So when I tried to get a page of book titles from my library app, 
Maypole::CLI would occasionally pass along this error message:

Can't use string ("JeevesLibrary::Titles") as a HASH ref while "strict 
refs" in use at /usr/local/libdata/perl5/site_perl/Class/DBI.pm line 494.

In the underlying database, the titles table has an is_public field, so 
when Class::DBI creates an accessor for that field, it stomps on the 
is_public method Maypole::Model::CDBI had provided--the method that 
Maypole was expecting to see when it calls is_applicable.  I thought I 
had a clever workaround involving accessor_name, but at some point in 
all my BEGIN hackery it stopped working, and I was despondent until I 
realized there was a brute-force workaround:

   package JeevesLibrary::Titles;

   sub is_public {
       my ($self, $action) = @_;
       Maypole::Model::CDBI->is_public( $action );
   }

Humble request to the Maypole maintainers: Please add something to the 
initialization code that will detect these kinds of conflicts between 
the database schema and the methods that Maypole expects to see in its 
model classes, and give the user a more helpful diagnostic message than 
the one I had to puzzle over.

-- 
"If John Kerry was the last best hope for the Republic ... then maybe
  it wasn't worth saving in the first place.  I don't believe that,
  though. And neither do you." --Dan Layman-Kennedy
// seth gordon // sethg@ropine.com // http://dynamic.ropine.com/yo/ //