Accessing many-to-many relationships in Catalyst

[LunarCowgirl]

I'm sure the answer is probably simple, but I haven't yet stumbled onto it. I've been learning DBIx::Class with Catalyst. So far I've been able to figure out how they work together, but I'm stuck on one issue.

I have a many-to-many relationship that joins together three tables which are basically called "page", "chapter", and "book". I can gather resultsets and pass them into Template Toolkit, using them as such:

[% page.book.title %]: [% page.chapter.num %]

which prints out the title and chapter number of the book. My questions is: how can I do that within Catalyst itself? I'm setting up an RSS feed, and I need access to "page.book.num" and "page.chapter.num" to create a url within the feed. I've tried both variations below, as well as others:

# Gets latest 10 results
my $rs = $c->model('DB::Page')->get_rss;

while ( my $page = $rs->next ) {
    my $book    = sprintf( "%02d", $page->book->{num} );
    my $chapter = sprintf( "%02d", $page->chapter->num );
    ...
}

Neither of those work. The first returns "00". The second produces an error that "num" can't be found. Is there any simple way to do this?

[Your Mother]

We would have to see your relationships to help, I think. Also this does not sound like a many_to_many situation to me. A book has_many chapters and has_many pages, as does the chapter. They each belong_to a chapter and a book. Many pages are not in many books.

Pseudo-ish code, three Result files: Book, Chapter, Page

package Book;
use parent "DBIx::Class::Core";

__PACKAGE__->table("book");
__PACKAGE__->add_columns(qw/ id title /);
__PACKAGE__->set_primary_key("id");
__PACKAGE__->has_many( chapters => "Chapter",
                       { "foreign.book" => "self.id" } );
# Probably a belongs_to Author here...
1;

package Chapter;
use parent "DBIx::Class::Core";

__PACKAGE__->table("chapter");
__PACKAGE__->add_columns(qw/ id title num book /);
__PACKAGE__->set_primary_key("id");
__PACKAGE__->has_many( pages => "Page",
                       { "foreign.chapter" => "self.id" } );
__PACKAGE__->belongs_to( book => "Book" );
1;

package Page;
use parent "DBIx::Class::Core";

__PACKAGE__->table("page");
__PACKAGE__->add_columns(qw/ id content chapter num /);
__PACKAGE__->set_primary_key("id");
__PACKAGE__->belongs_to( book => "Chapter" );
1;

Then for TT2, [% page.chapter.book.title %]: [% page.chapter.num %]. And–

# Gets latest 10 results
while ( my $page = $rs->next ) {
    my $book    = sprintf( "%02d", $page->chapter->book->title ); # Bo
+ok number???
    my $chapter = sprintf( "%02d", $page->chapter->num );
}

Note, I feel "position" or "order" (bad name for DB columns) is superior to "num." It is self-regulating if set-up right, like an array, if you remove an element (page or chapter) from the middle, all the others adjust.

[LunarCowgirl]

Thanks for the advice and the examples you gave. They were very helpful, and perhaps I may make a few changes in the database design before the site goes into production. The relationship I have is indeed many-to-many but could probably be expressed better like you suggested. However, I did manage to solve my problem. Your post caused me to look up a few things, and I learned what I was doing wrong.

In a many-to-many relationship, if you're trying to get a single value, you need to use first->, like so:

$page->chapter->first->num

That does what I needed. Apparently Template Toolkit doesn't require that, as I haven't had to use first with it to do the same thing.

Again. Thanks for your help. :)