Over a year ago I read this blog post. To be honest at the time I thought it was mostly silly and I still feel that way. The things that are important to me in an ORM are capabilities, not subjective prettiness of code. But, I also get tired of typing repetitive things, especially __PACKAGE__->. That’s just too many shift keys! So after working on a few different modules and accruing various bits of knowledge here and there I learned what I needed to to create a sugar layer for DBIx::Class that doesn’t throw the baby out with the bath-water.

I am proud to announce the initial, development version of DBIx::Class::Candy, which should be coming to a CPAN mirror near you very soon. If you just can’t wait, use cpanf to get it right now. The basic gist of it is that you can use:

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 package MyApp::Schema::Result::Artist;

 use DBIx::Class::Candy;

 table 'artists';

 column id => {
   data_type => 'int',
   is_auto_increment => 1,
 };

 column name => {
   data_type => 'varchar',
   size => 25,
   is_nullable => 1,
 };

 primary_key 'id';

 has_many albums => 'A::Schema::Result::Album', 'artist_id';

 1;

instead of

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 package MyApp::Schema::Result::Artist;

 use strict;
 use warnings;
 use base 'DBIx::Class::Core';

 __PACKAGE__->table('artists');

 __PACKAGE__->add_columns(
   id => {
     data_type => 'int',
     is_auto_increment => 1,
   },
   name => {
     data_type => 'varchar',
     size => 25,
     is_nullable => 1,
   }
 );

 __PACKAGE__->set_primary_key('id');

 __PACKAGE__->has_many( albums => 'A::Schema::Result::Album', 'artist_id' );

 1;

There are a few other features, like having it turn on 5.10 or 5.12 features, use a non standard base, and more. Check it out now!