The Quest for an ObjectScript Iterator (part 1)

One of the advantages of Caché is the close integration of programming language and database. It's trivially easy to read and write directly to and from the db in Cache ObjectScript code.

But that ease has a downside : it's so tempting to shunt stuff in and out at a moment's notice, that if not careful, you can suddenly find yourself with an extremely tight inter-dependency between the database structure and your business logic. Hard commitments to the details of your data-base schema are scattered in hundreds of places throughout the code, making any change expensive.

The conscientious programmer will want to put some kind of abstraction layer or API between direct database calls and the rest of the business logic. Such a layer comes in handy if you find you need to add extra logging or transaction protection during record saves, for example.

But the nature of the database makes this a challenge for those used to other languages and ways of doing things. There are particular difficulties when it comes to looping through the tables, as ObjectScript's commands for this make direct reference to the the schema.

In this series of blog-posts I'll describe my own ongoing quest for a decent way to abstract away from direct db access and for some sort of Iterator to let business logic run through collections of records without (much) knowledge of how they're stored.