On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 10:31:36PM -0700, Jonathan Leffler wrote:
>
> What should you return if no value has been generated (yet)?
undef seems most reasonable.
I think "undefined" would be better (as in, "don't do that").
Databases are likely to do various things, for example Sybase
seems to give 0. I don't think the Sybase driver wants to
translate 0 to undef (perhaps 0 is legitimate sometimes) or try
to keep track of whether an ID has been generated yet.
Ideally, the last-inserted-id would be returned in the same step
as the insert, maybe in the form of $id = $dbh->insertrow("INSERT
INTO ..."), but I understand you are tailoring the interface to
the standard practice of stateful handles.
-John
