Moose::Cookbook::Legacy::Table_ClassMetaclass(3) Adding a table attribute to the metaclass

VERSION

version 2.1605

SYNOPSIS


package MyApp::Meta::Class;
use Moose;
extends 'Moose::Meta::Class';
has table => (
is => 'rw',
isa => 'Str',
);

DESCRIPTION

WARNING: Subclassing metaclasses (as opposed to providing metaclass traits) is strongly discouraged. This recipe is provided solely for reference when encountering older code that does this.

In this recipe, we'll create a new metaclass which has a ``table'' attribute. This metaclass is for classes associated with a DBMS table, as one might do for an ORM.

In this example, the table name is just a string, but in a real ORM the table might be an object describing the table.

THE METACLASS

This really is as simple as the recipe ``SYNOPSIS'' shows. The trick is getting your classes to use this metaclass, and providing some sort of sugar for declaring the table. This is covered in Moose::Cookbook::Extending::Recipe2, which shows how to make a module like "Moose.pm" itself, with sugar like "has_table()".

Using this Metaclass in Practice

Accessing this new "table" attribute is quite simple. Given a class named "MyApp::User", we could simply write the following: 

  my $table = MyApp::User->meta->table;

As long as "MyApp::User" has arranged to use "MyApp::Meta::Class" as its metaclass, this method call just works. If we want to be more careful, we can check the metaclass's class: 

  $table = MyApp::User->meta->table
      if MyApp::User->meta->isa('MyApp::Meta::Class');

CONCLUSION

Creating custom metaclass is trivial. Using it is a little harder, and is covered in other recipes. We will also talk about applying traits to a class metaclass, which is a more flexible and cooperative implementation.

AUTHORS

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2006 by Infinity Interactive, Inc.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.

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