I’ve been writing a fair bit of PL/Perl for a client, and one of the things I’ve been doing is eliminating a ton of duplicate code by creating utility functions in the %_SHARED hash. This is great, as long as the code that creates those functions gets executed at the beginning of every database connection. So I put the utility generation code into a single function, called prepare_perl_utils(). It looks something like this:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION prepare_perl_utils(
) RETURNS bool LANGUAGE plperl IMMUTABLE AS $$
    # Don't bother if we've already loaded.
    return 1 if $_SHARED{escape_literal};

    $_SHARED{escape_literal} = sub {
        $_[0] =~ s/'/''/g; $_[0] =~ s/\\/\\\\/g; $_[0];
    };

    # Create other code refs in %_SHARED…
$$;

So now all I have to do is make sure that all the client’s apps execute this function as soon as they connect, so that the utilities will all be loaded up and ready to go. Here’s how I did it.

First, for the Perl app, I just took advantage of the DBI’s callbacks to execute the SQL I need when the DBI connects to the database. That link might not work just yet, as the DBI’s callbacks have only just been documented and that documentation appears only in dev releases so far. Once 1.611 drops, the link should work. At any rate, the use of callbacks I’m exploiting here has been in the DBI since 1.49, which was released in November 2005.

The approach is the same as I’ve described before: Just specify the Callbacks parameter to DBI->connect, like so:

my $dbh = DBI->connect_cached($dsn, $user, $pass, {
    PrintError     => 0,
    RaiseError     => 1,
    AutoCommit     => 1,
    Callbacks      => {
        connected => sub { shift->do('SELECT prepare_perl_utils()' },
    },
});

That’s it. The connected method is a no-op in the DBI that gets called to alert subclasses that they can do any post-connection initialization. Even without a subclass, we can take advantage of it to do our own initialization.

It was a bit trickier to make the same thing happen for the client’s Rails app. Rails, alas, provides no on-connection callbacks. So we instead have to monkey-patch Rails to do what we want. With some help from “dfr|mac” on #rubyonrails (I haven’t touched Rails in 3 years!), I got it worked down to this:

class ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::PostgreSQLAdapter
    def initialize_with_perl_utils(*args)
    returning(initialize_without_perl_utils(*args)) do
        execute('SELECT prepare_perl_utils()')
    end
    end
    alias_method_chain :initialize, :perl_utils
end

Basically, we overpower the PostgreSQL adapter’s initialize method and have it call initialize_with_perl_utils before it returns. It’s a neat trick; if you’re going to practice fuck typing, alias_method_chain makes it about as clean as can be, albeit a little too magical for my tastes.

Anyway, recorded here for posterity (my blog is my other brain!).

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