I am kinda new to Zend. And this seriously is some smart work done by you here. I didn’t know about CodeGen before so thanks on that part too.

However, I am a little confused as to how is this code executed to generate the requisite php files.

Hope you are still reachable through this link.

Thanks.

I understand your question now, thanks for clearing that up. To best honest, I haven’t taken this code past where it is now. I see this more as a starting point for a project – or a way of quickly recreating files when database tables change. For me, there seems to be little benefits in spending time adding more functionality when there are so many scenarios to be handled.

I don’t believe describeTable gives you any foreign key information to know if there is a relationship in the table. I guess you would have to start by looking at the ‘table_constraints’ table in ‘information_schema’ to see what relationships exists for you schema (assuming we are talking about MySQL). From there, using the table_name and constraint_type fields, you would be able to know what objects need relationships to each other and where. Hope this helps.

*Edit: Actually the `information_schema`.`COLUMNS` table has probably everything you need. Shows the table, field, what table and fields are being referenced.

What I am looking for is a good way to translate the database relations into the model representation in php.

Lets use a simple blog entry example.

class Blog_Model_Entry{
protected $_id;
protected $_title;
protected $_content;
// @var Blog_Model_Category
protected $_category;
// @var array of Blog_Model_Tag
protected $_tags;
//…
}

Aboveyou can see the relation with parent table Category.

What I am currently doing is: (In the mapper class of the blog entry) I instantiate the category mapper to map the parent row to a category model class. An example:

// from the blog entry mapper class
public function map(Zend_Db_Table_Row $row, Blog_Model_Entry $model)
{
$model->setId($row->id);
$model->setTitle($row->title);
$model->setContent($row->content);

// find parent row, possible with defined table relation
$cat = $row->findParentRow(‘Blog_Model_DbTable_Category’);

// instantiate category, mapper and then map
$category = new Blog_Model_Category();
$mapper = new Blog_Model_CategoryMapper();
$mapper->map($cat, $category);

// set Blog_Entry_Model category
$model->setCategory($category);

// something similar for tags and comments
//…
//…
}

So to go back to my question; for generating code, how would you look at this or have you found a good solution to generate code in this way (for scenarios where you have 1:1, 1:n, n:m relations)

I call the mapper directly to do basic CRUD operations which uses the DbTable. In the case of fetch/fetchAll on the mapper, the mapper returns an instance or an array of object instances specific to that mapper.

So, if we are talking about Users, I’ll have a UserModel, UserMapper, UserDbTable (I like to store each in a different folder). If I want to grab all users I would do something like:

$mapper = new UserMapper();
$users = $mapper->fetchAll();

The fetchAll method in the mapper would call the UserDbTable instance fetchAll. For example:

$table = new UserDbTable();
return $table->fetchAll();

Have you maybe already worked out how the DbTable, Model and Mapper work with table relations? I am working on something similar but I haven’t yet found a good way to deal with table relationships.

What I have for now is up for download. I didn’t use the code generator classes from zend though. (http://www.sreknord.net/download#download3)