Zend DB

Zend_Db_Table does a great job of abstracting database tables, but it's really intended to hit one database per application. This tutorial demonstrates a method of using as many databases as you want by simply specifying them in your config file.

Since I prefer ADODB over Zend Framework's own Zend_DB, I had a small problem: How to use it with Zend_Auth to authenticate the user? Good thing Zend employs smart people: they use an adapter to control the database access in the Zend_Auth class, called Zend_Auth_Adapter. You can define your own authentication adapter quite easily by creating a class which implements the Zend_Auth_Adapter_Interface interface class.

I’m starting to get hooked on the Zend Framework’s abstraction to the PDO

Today I was toying around with new code architecture. Previously, how I might have implemented a Model would have been something similar to this:

Zend_Db_Table is a very, VERY handy class for working with databases. It has come up in numerous posts on this blog. But I’ve always felt that for a complete model implementation there was something missing.

Earlier today, I wrote a little extension to Zend_Db_Table that allows for “custom” fields to be added to it’s rows. When it was done some other ideas came floating up. Why wouldn’t I make my life even easier, by creating fields that don’t output their values directly.

I'm taking a quick look at adding fields that aren't in the table, but may be handy in your application. Like adding a field "name" that combines both first and last name, without having to change your database or write too much code. Quick, dirty, but extremely handy.

Zend_Db_Adapter is the database API abstraction layer for the Zend Framework. Based on PDO, you can use Zend_Db_Adapter to connect to and work with any of the supported SQL database systems using the same API. These include Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and others.

This is a very quick tutorial on how to allow developers to develop using the Zend Framework without having to or being able to install PDO on their servers. I have to warn you though, this is not an official extension of the Zend Framework just yet.

I've put together a database admin application using the database functionality provided by the Zend Framework. Basically, it's a generic set of classes that allows people to quickly add, edit, delete, and view data in a database table. The nice thing is that this uses the Zend_DB_Table classes, so it should presumably work with just about any database supported by the Zend Framework. I've tried this on mySQL and sqlite, and it worked just fine on both. There are some limitations of course. Right now this will only work on tables that have auto-increment primary keys. I don't quite know how this would work with databases that don't have auto-increment such as Oracle - maybe this could have support for defining the sequence that should be used when inserting data. This is a PHP5 only class due to it's reliance on the Zend Framework.