Seeking guidance for web/db application

[neilwatson]

Greetings,

I seldom venture in the web end of the Perl pool, but am doing so now and I seek your advice. I'm using Mojolicious and I'm thinking about how to divide up my code. I was thinking of using a module for database functions, but am wondering how I'm going to pass DB handles back and forth. For example:

DB module:

sub new { bless {}; shift }

sub connect 
{
   my $self = shift;
   my %param = @_;
   my $table = "cf_status_log";

   my $dbh = DBI->connect(
         "DBI:Pg:dbname=$param{'db_name'}; host=$param{'db_host'}",
         "$param{'db_user'}", "$param{'db_pass'}",
         { RaiseError => 1 }
   ) or die "Could not connect to database";
   return $dbh;
};

sub inventory_query 
{
   my $dbh = shift;
   my $result = $dbh->prepare( "SELECT * FROM dr_inventory_classes" )
      || die "Could not prepare" ;
}
1;

And the main app:

use lib 'lib';
use DeltaR;

my $dr = DeltaR->new;

sub dbh 
{ 
   my $self = shift;
   my $dbh = $dr->connect(
      db_name => "postgres",
      db_user => "postgres",
      db_pass => "",
      db_host => "127.0.0.1"
   );
   return $dbh;
};

get '/inventory' => sub
{
   my $self = shift;
   my $dbh = dbh;
    my $rows = $dr->query_inventory( $dbh );

   $self->stash(
      title => "Inventory report",
      record_limit => $record_limit,
      rows => $rows,
      columns => [ 'Count', 'Class' ]
   );

} => "rtable";

app->start;

I don't want to make unneeded connections because not all pages will require the database. I don't know if handle passing like this is the best approach. How would you do it? Passing $dbh around is a bit fiddly. Is there a better way?

[davido]

Make the database handle an attribute stored in the Mojolicious application class. Better yet, make a DBIx::Connector object an attribute stored in the application class. Either way, that attibute will be available from within the controller, and can then be passed to your model. See the following Mojolicious documentation that shows examples both for full Mojolicious apps, and for Mojolicious::Lite apps:

https://github.com/kraih/mojo/wiki/Hypnotoad-prefork-web-server