NAME

Class::Persist::Blob - More flexible Class::Persist subclass

DESCRIPTION

If you want to store lots of complicated data in your object, and you don't want to have to go to the trouble of creating database columns for it all, your object can subclass Class::Persist::Blob instead of Class::Persist. Class::Persist::Blob will store specified properties of your object in the database in the same way as Class::Persist, but will also use Storable to save other properties into a BLOB in the database, in a column called 'dump'. When you retrieve the object later, these properties will be inflated from the dump column and returned to you.

SYNOPSIS

  package My::Complicated;
  use base qw( Class::Persist::Blob );
  __PACKAGE__->db_table("some_table");
  __PACKAGE__->simple_db_spec( name => "CHAR(30)" );
  __PACKAGE__->blob_fields(qw( age list ));

  package main;
  my $complicated = My::Complicated->new;
  $complicated->set( name => "Dave" );
  $complicated->set( age => "20" );
  $complicated->set( list => [ 1, 2, 3, 4 ] );
  $complicated->store;

  my $oid = $complicated->oid;
  my $copy = My::Complicated->load( $oid );
  print $copy->get('age'); # prints 20
  print Dumper($copy->get('list')); # prints the list

You can store most arbitrarily complicated things in an object, anything Storable can store will work. This means no dbhs, etc, of course.

LIMITATIONS

There are several limitations of using Class::Persist::Blob - it's not magic. The main one is that you can only use the search() function to search in columns that are actually stored in the database. Also, you can't store magic things in the object, database handles, apache requests, etc.

We use the db column 'blob' to store the data. Make sure your app doesn't need this.

blob_fields( field list )

Declare, for this package, all the fields that you want stored into the blob column.

blob_fields_all()

Returns a list of all blob fields that this class and all its superclasses use.