-- Mon Zafra <mon...@gmail.com> wrote
(on Thursday, 16 July 2009, 11:35 AM +0800):
> That's neat. I've always wondered why Zend_Db_Table is an abstract class
> extending another abstract class while not adding any new methods.
Originally, Zend_Db_Table was abstract itself. At some point, we started
using the naming convention of _Abstract for abstract classes (this is
changing now, due to preparation for usage of namespaces), and
Zend_Db_Table_Abstract was created; to keep backwards compatibility,
Zend_Db_Table was kept, but made to extend Zend_Db_Table_Abstract.
An interesting thing is that Zend_Db_Table_Abstract has allowed you to
pass in the table name and primary key via the constructor -- but with
no concrete class, the use case has been largely overlooked.
Additionally, while that use case can be nice for one-off stuff, it
doesn't allow you to re-use such instances with related tables. What
Ralph has done is add support for creating a table definition, which
allows precisely this use case. It's also flexible enough that you can
mix and match generic instances with concrete instances of your own.
> On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 9:49 PM, Ralph Schindler <ralph.schind...@zend.com>
> wrote:
>
> Hello all!
>
> I have commited to trunk a new feature for Zend_Db_Table that will be in
> ZF
> 1.9. That feature is the ability to use concrete instantiation on tables.
> What does that mean? It means this is possible:
>
> $authorTable = new Zend_Db_Table('author');
> $authors = $authorTable->fetchAll();
> foreach ($authors as $author) {
> echo $author->id . ': '
> . $author->first_name . ' '
> . $author->last_name . PHP_EOL;
> }
>
> On the more complex side, you are able to define a definition that would
> house all the same rules you previously had to define your Zend_Db_Table
> inherited classes with.
>
> Without going into the gory details, please see this url below for all of
> the working use cases I have attempted to solve:
>
> http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/standard/branches/user/ralph/
> ZendDbTable/scripts/
>
> You are free to check out that folder from svn, and run and play with
> those
> scripts. There is a complete sqlite database, and the bootstrap for that
> mini set of script will recreate the sqlite file database on each run.
>
> The only use case which is deprecated as of 1.9 will be if you are
> extending Zend_Db_Table (not Zend_Db_Table_Abstract), and are attempting
> to
> instantiate the class via a string, where the string represents the key
> name in the registry of the database adapter. Since Zend_Db_Table has
> been
> deprecated since 0.9, I don't this should be a problem for anyone.
>
> Please test out this new feature, and report back any issues to me.
>
> Thanks & Happy ZF'ing!
>
> -ralph
>
>
--
Matthew Weier O'Phinney
Project Lead | matt...@zend.com
Zend Framework | http://framework.zend.com/
