Rob Allen's DevNotes

Let's say that you want to set up a one-to-many relationship between two tables: Artists and Albums because you've refactored my ZF1 tutorial.

Let's assume that an artist has many albums. These are the basic table definitions:

artists table: id, artist
albums table: id, artist_id, title

When you list the albums, you obviously want to see the artist name rather than the id, so clearly you use a join!

Assuming you're using Zend_Db_Table, the easiest way is to turn off the integrity check and do a join in a mapper or table method.

Something like this:

class AlbumTable extends Zend_Db_Table_Abstract
{
    protected $_name = 'album';

    public function fetchAllWithArtistName($order = array('title ASC'))
    {
        $select = $this->select();
        $select->setIntegrityCheck(false);
        $select->from($this->_name);
        
        $select->joinLeft('artist', 'album.artist_id = artist.id', 
            array('artist_name' => 'name'));
        $select->order($order);
        
        $rows = $this->fetchAll($select);
        return $rows;
    }
    
}

The row set returned will have all the columns from the albums table and one additional column called artist_name which is an alias of the name column from the artists table.

Jason Grimes has posted an article showing how to use Doctrine 2 with Zend Framework 2.

He uses my tutorial as the starting point which enables him to concentrate on the Doctrine integration rather than the irrelevant details about setting a ZF2 application which is excellent.

He walks through 6 steps in order to do the integration:

This article shows how to set up and use Doctrine 2 in Zend Framework 2, by extending Rob’s Getting Started tutorial to use Doctrine instead of Zend_Db.

• Start with Akrabat’s tutorial
• Install Doctrine modules
• Configure the Album module to use Doctrine
• Create the Album entity
• Update the Album controller to use Doctrine instead of Zend_Db
• That’s it!

I highly recommend having a read if you're at all interested in using Doctrine 2 with Zend Framework 2.

Zend Framework 2, Beta 2 has been released!

The key new features are:

• Refactored Mail component
• Refactored Cache component
• MVC updates

Check out Matthew's blog post for the full details.

I've also updated my tutorial. This is a good time to get involved, try it out and let us know what you like/dislike.

With the announcement of Zend Framework beta 1, I have updated my venerable tutorial to work with it!

Getting started with Zend Framework 2 (beta1), creates the same application as my ZF1 tutorial, so it should be very familiar, but this time, it's in the context of Zend Framework 2. As usual, it's a PDF too.

Please download it, try it out and let me know if you find any typos!

One thing that is different between Zend_Config_Xml and Zend_Config_Ini is that with Zend_Config_Xml you can pass in an XML string as the first parameter of the constructor and it will work. This doesn't work with Zend_Config_Ini as we use parse_ini_file() under the hood.

With PHP 5.3 however there is is a new function called parse_ini_string() which will allow us to load arbitrary ini string into Zend_Config objects. This can't go into Zend Framework 1 though due to our PHP 5.2.4 minimum version requirement.

As I needed this for a project, I extended Zend_Config_Ini to support this feature, which means simply overloading a single method

class App_Config_Ini extends Zend_Config_Ini
{
    /**
     * Load the INI file from disk using parse_ini_file(). Use a private error
     * handler to convert any loading errors into a Zend_Config_Exception
     *
     * @param string $filename
     * @throws Zend_Config_Exception
     * @return array
     */
    protected function _parseIniFile($filename)
    {
        set_error_handler(array($this, '_loadFileErrorHandler'));
        if (substr($filename, -4) == '.ini') {
            $iniArray = parse_ini_file($filename, true);
        } else {        
            $iniArray = parse_ini_string($filename, true);
        }
        restore_error_handler();

        // Check if there was a error while loading file
        if ($this->_loadFileErrorStr !== null) {
            /**
             * @see Zend_Config_Exception
             */
            require_once 'Zend/Config/Exception.php';
            throw new Zend_Config_Exception($this->_loadFileErrorStr);
        }

        return $iniArray;
    }
}

The actual change is to see if the last 4 characters of the filename are ".ini" and if they aren't then use parse_ini_string() instead of parse_ini_file(). The rest of the code is just error handling.

This is one area where I really like it when a class implements methods that done just one thing.