Re: quoting entity and attribute names

Sender: John Lenton <[email protected]>

On Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 07:54:02PM +0200, Sebastien Bigaret wrote:
> 
> John Lenton <[email protected]> wrote:
> > In a project I'm currently working on there is a class that we'd like
> > to call "User", but we can't call it that and use Modeling in its
> > current state: it's not quoting the names of entities (nor
> > attributes), and user is a reserved word.
> > 
> > I looked into it, and I actually got it working, but I then saw that
> > in SQLExpression there's a method `externalNameQuoteCharacter'; is the
> > purpose of this method to be used (something like) this:
> > 
> >     [ in _addTableJoinsForAlias ]
> > 
> >     quoteChar = self.externalNameQuoteCharacter()
> >     str += quoteChar + self._internals.entityExternalNameForAlias(alias) + quoteChar + ' ' + alias
> > 
> > ?
> 
> And to answer this very precisely, I do not feel really comfortable with
> quoting external names when unneeded; the quoting should IMHO be done
> only when a whole SQL statement is returned, not during intermediate
> steps. This makes assembleDelete|Select|UpdateStatement() methods good
> candidates, doesn't it?

agreed on the first point, but not on the second: assembleFoo takes a
'tableList' parameter that is already a (list of) table name(s). For
the singular case this wouldn't be a problem, but in the case of
select at least it very much is (IMVHO). I think the place to do this
would be, for table names, tableListWithRootEntity (possibly via a
'quoted' parameter?); however, this implies that
_addTableJoinsForAlias must behave similarly. For attribute names it
seems the functionality should be in sqlStringForAttribute, but that
might be too generic.

comments? I'm moving ahead with this implementation, but I understand
it might have to be redone in some other way (time presses *now* :) )

-- 
John Lenton ([email protected]) -- Random fortune:
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature
replaces it with.
		-- Tennessee Williams


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