PHP DBIC

In Perl there is a module called DBIx::Class and it is extremely very good
and makes dealing with databases somewhat of a doddle.

However, if you are like me and you have found yourself lumbered with a 
host that doesn't give you shell access so you can't actually install DBIC,
then you will probably have decided you have to use PHP, since it is the
only language that actually works there.

This project is the marriage of DBIC's ease with PHP's supportedness, and
with any luck you should find that writing PHP is only very painful instead
of prohibitively so.


DEPENDENCIES

 PHP5
 PDO


AUTHOR, HOMEPAGE ETC

Altreus 
http://github.com/altreus
Bug reports on github please. Contributions welcome


LICENCE

This software is licenced under the X11 licence as defined at the URL below.

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php


USAGE

It is quite easy to use. You should put the phpdbic.php file in the include
directory and require it in your script.

  <?
  require_once "phpdbic.php";

Then you define a Schema class. I put my reading of the config in here, but
feel free to simply pass the config into your own constructor. However, it
is important that you write a constructor because we'll need it later.

  class MySchema extends Schema {
      public function __construct() {
          parent::__construct( $config['dsn'], $config['db_user'], $config['db_pass'] );
      }
  }

Then define one or more TableDef classes. Each of these classes represents a
table in your database.

  class MyTable extends TableDef {
      public function __construct() {
          $cols = array(
              "id" => array(
                  "data_type" => "integer",
                  "is_pk"     => 1,
                  "is_ai"     => 1,
                  "is_nullable" => 0,
              ),
              "title" => array(
                  "data_type" => "varchar",
                  "size"      => 255,
                  "is_nullable" => 0,
              ),
              "artist" => array(
                  "data_type" => "varchar",
                  "size"      => 255,
                  "is_nullable" => 0,
              ),
          );
          parent::__construct("mytable", $cols);
      }
  }

The cols array is an assoc. The keys are the column names and the values are
more assoc arrays. The keys shown above are pretty much the only ones we care
about in this version. 'pk' means primary key and 'ai' means auto increment.

Pass the column definitions and the table name into the parent constructor.
Now, go back to the constructor of your Schema class and add a new line for
each TableDef class you defined:

  class MySchema extends Schema {
      public function __construct() {
          parent::__construct( $config['dsn'], $config['db_user'], $config['db_pass'] );
          
          $this->register_resultset( "MyTable" );
      }
  }

You must provide the class name that you have created. You can also pass in
the name of a class that extends ResultSet as the second parameter. If you 
don't, you are provided with the default ResultSet class. More on that later.

Anyway that's pretty much it.

  $db = new MySchema();
  $record = $db->resultset("MyTable")->find($id);

The find() and all() methods are the only ones currently defined (give me time)
and they return, respectively, a single Record object or an array of them.

The Record class is a data model only and does not interact with the database
except when it is constructed with an ID, whereupon it finds its data. Users
will not normally create a new Record class themselves.

The methods you should know about on the Record class are get_value, which
takes the column name, and data(), which takes no parameters and returns the
Record as an assoc array.

More functionality pending.

As for those ResultSet classes, if you define your own one:

  class MyResultSet extends ResultSet {
      public function titles_beginning_with_t() {
      }
  }

In this example, the method titles_beginning_with_t will be available on the
ResultSet you get back from the Schema:

  $db = new MySchema();
  $tbwt = $db->resultset("MyTable")->titles_beginning_with_t();

To do that, you have to pass "MyResultSet" as the second parameter to 
register_resultset in MySchema's constructor. Otherwise you get the default.

This mimics the behaviour of DBIx::Class's ResultSet, except it doesn't do
anything yet because I've not done any more than what you see here. However,
the functionality is there waiting to be implemented so it is a matter of time.