NAME

TABLEOp - Module for Table level operations

SYNOPSIS

use TABLEop;

$titles = new TABLEop ( $dbh, "titles" );

$titles->insert ( \%data );
$titles->update ( \%data, \%where );
$titles->delete ( \%where );
@all_rows = $titles->select (" where title_id < 10 ");
%one_row = $titles->select ( " where title_id = 4 ");

DESCRIPTION

These routines allow you to treat your data as hashes. They generate
insert, delete, update statments and actually run them against
the server. It does the work of generating sql for you. It puts
the necessary quotes if the datatype is char, datetime etc.

Additionally you could also do select and get all rows as 
an array of hash-references or get just one row as a single 
hash-reference.

Specification of table follows the usual Sybase conventions,
i.e. if you did not specify absolute name, it looks if the user
has a table by the same name.

The module remembers the full path name of the table and uses it
for all operations. This avoids the  risk of inadvertant
changes to your application's database context. 

Creating a handle

use TABLEop;

$titles = new TABLEop ( $dbh, "titles" );

Inserting

%data = ('title_id' => 50, 
         'title' => 'Perl Book', 
         'price' => 50.24, 
         'pub_date' => 'Jan 1 1900' );


$titles->insert ( \%data );

Deleting

%where = ( 'title_id' => 50 );

$titles->delete ( \%where );

Updating

%data = ('title' => 'Perl New Book', 
         'price' => 150.24, 
         'pub_date' => 'Jan 1 2100' );

%where = ('title_id' = 50 );

$titles->update ( \%data, \%where );

Selecting

The select behaves defferently depending on whether you are 
expecting one row OR many rows.
If you wantarray, you get an Array of hash-references, 
else you get just a single hash-reference.

@all_rows = $titles->select ("where title_id < 50");
OR 
@all_rows = $titles->select (""); #Select all the rows !

foreach $row ( @all_rows) {
    printf "title is %s\n", $row->{'title'};
}

OR you could,

$arow = $title->select ( "where title_id = 30");
printf "The title is %s.\n", $arow->{'title');

Features wanted, unwanted

Currently does not handle NULL in update/delete/insert.
This will cause an error. All error handling is left to the caller.

It would be nice to automatically generate single row updates
by figuring out unique key columns. 


Manish I Shah
mshah@bfm.com