Is it possible to make a mapper class that loads & modifies only some
fields in a table rather than all the fields, yet still autoloads the
fields rather than having hardcoded column types?  I've been avoiding
the ORM because frequenty I want to iterate every record without
loading some large text fields, and to avoid 20-line SELECTS in the
log which make debugging less convenient.  Yet now I have a
data-conversion project and have been charmed at the ability to load
an object, modify and flush it, without having to do "SELECT" +
"UPDATE ... WHERE".

When I brought this up previously (in a read-only context), somebody
suggested mapping a Select rather than a Table.  That worked but it
led to "select of select" or "select of select of select", which
performed considerably worse than building a query dynamically (by
calling a function to to create the query and set the field list, and
then calling .append_whereclause several times).

What I'd like to do is pass a list of column names to the Table
constructor and have it autoload those and ignore the others.  I
couldn't find an argument for this.  Alternatively I could autoload
the table and then delete the undesired columns via a list
comprehension, but it looks like that would involve modifying private
attributes with possibly unintended consequences.

A few other questions and comments:

- Is there a supported way to add/remove fields from a query after
it's been constructed?

- The .scalar() method of query results is incredibly useful but
poorly documented.  It's shown in a few examples in the manual but not
explained.  I added ticket #549 for it, and just now saw zzzeek's
comment requesting wording explaining both that and the entire
ResultProxy class, so I'll work on that.

-- 
Mike Orr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

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