[cgiapp] review of Catalyst::Model::CDBI::CRUD from a CGI::App perspective

[Mark Stosberg <suppressed>]

While I have yet to thoroughly review Catalyst, I imagine if there was
going to be something about to inspire envy from me, it would be the

Catalyst::Model::CDBI::CRUD

which helps build CRUD applications. 

Here's my review of it:

What I liked: 

- It is fundamentally well designed. The guts of the functionality
  are appropriately outsourced to Class::DBI::FromForm and
  Class::DBI::AsForm.

- It provides reasonable defaults, but makes it easy to customize the
  system with unique logic or graphic designs. 

- It would be very easy to re-implement something like it in
  CGI::Application because the "hard parts" are in the above Class::DBI
  modules or the sample TT templates. 

However, I saw a number of areas for improvement:

- The names could be improved. 'edit' and 'do_edit' are confusing.  What's the difference? 
  I suggest what was worked well for me: 'edit_form_display' and 'edit_form_process'.

- The system does use Data::FormValidator for form validation, but only
  weakly, by demonstrating how to make all the fields optional. Getting
  Data::FormValidator::Util::Generator to work would improve this
  integration significantly. 

- There is no handling of missing/invalid error fields by default. This
  could be easily and significantly improved by using DFV::Util::HTML
  and ValidateRM(). to reload the page with errors. 

- BREAD has better appeal than CRUD. :)

For my part, I'll work on getting DFV::Util::Generator working again, at
least with PostgreSQL.  Considering this works with DB internals, it
will probably need some customization for other DB backends. 

    Mark

-- 
http://mark.stosberg.com/ 


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