How does DBIx::Class handle boolean values?

Question

I'm using DBIx::Class in my perl script to interact with a sqlite database.

When doing inserts/searches, what will DBIx::Class consider 'true' and 'false'?

eg:

$schema->resultset('SomeObject')->create({ some_boolean => 1, primary_key => 1 });

$schema->resultset('SomeObject')->search({ some_boolean => 'true' });

Any help or documentation is appreciated (I haven't been able to find it in the DBIx::Class docs, but maybe I'm missing something.

Thanks in advance.

Awildaawkward

Answer 1

http://sqlite.org/datatype3.html says that SQLite doesn't have a boolean datatype but false is stored as integer 0 and true as integer 1.

Autochthon

worth noting, too, is that DBIx::Class treats undef as NULL. – Awildaawkward

Answer 2

DBIx::Class handle boolean values with help of DBIx::Class::InflateColumn::Boolean:

Load this component and declare columns as boolean values.

  package Table;
  __PACKAGE__->load_components(qw/InflateColumn::Boolean Core/);
  __PACKAGE__->table('table');
  __PACKAGE__->true_is('Y');
  __PACKAGE__->add_columns(
      foo => {
          data_type => 'varchar',
          is_boolean  => 1,
      },
      bar => {
          data_type => 'varchar',
          is_boolean  => 1,
          true_is     => qr/^(?:yes|ja|oui|si)$/i,
      },
      baz => {
          data_type => 'int',
          is_boolean  => 1,
          false_is    => ['0', '-1'],
      },
  );

Then you can treat the specified column as a boolean:

  print 'table.foo is ', $table->foo ? 'true' : 'false', "\n";
  print 'table.bar is ', $table->bar ? 'true' : 'false', "\n";

The boolean object still stringifies to the actual field value:

  print $table->foo;  # prints "Y" if it is true

UPD How to select rows whose fields are true
Because DBIx::Class uses SQL::Abstract to search fields with TRUE value you should refer to bool unary operator:

my %where  = (
    -bool       => 'is_user',
    -not_bool   => 'is_enabled',
);

Would give you:

WHERE is_user AND NOT is_enabled

Voracity

Answer 3

DBIx::Class would treat true and false the way perl does ... 0, '', undef, () and {} are "false" while anything else is "true".

Hokum

What about for null values? I think the class treats undef as NULL. – Awildaawkward

I don't think so, but I can't find documentation supporting either way. – Hokum

I can confirm that it treats undef as null. – Awildaawkward

Answer 4

Since people are finding this helpful, I thought I'd throw in the get_bool() function I wrote for translating a perl value to a DBIx-acceptable format:

sub get_bool {
  my $self = shift;
  my $bool = shift;
  return undef if(!defined $bool || $bool =~ m/^null$/i);
  return 0 if($bool =~ m/^(fail|not_ok|error|0)/i || $bool =~ m/^\s*$/);
  return 1;
}

Awildaawkward