| Subject: | wish: smarter field size development |
The module currently artifically limits its usefulness by not taking advantage of more meta data available in the database.
In particular, the length of the field is very useful to know. The good news is that this is accessible through the standard DBI column_info() method and is well supported by MySQL and PostgreSQL and probably others. Unfortunately, the underlying module currently being used, Class::DBI::Plugin::Type does not give you access to this information.
Once you have it, here's logic I've worked out in the past to smartly-size
text and textarea inputs.
sub calculate_text_field_size {
# As returned from DBI's column_info
my $col_metadata = shift;
my $default_field_size = 20;
my $col_size = $col_metadata->{COLUMN_SIZE};
my $input_type = 'text';
my $row_size;
# shrink the form of the field size is smaller than our default
my $size = $col_size if ($col_size < $default_field_size);
# make cells slightly larger than the data in them.
# this is needed to make it look "right" in some browsers.
if ($col_size <= $default_field_size) {
$size = $col_size+2;
}
# If it's larger than the default, turn it into a textarea
# This prevents things like varchar(4000) from looking crazy.
# The textarea is specially sized to fit the length of the field
else {
my $row_size = int $len/$default_field_size +1;
$input_type = 'textarea';
}
# We have now calculated these new values:
return ($col_size,$row_size,$input_type);
}