This page describes a modified version of the great ActiveRecord Class library.
Modifications made
No caching
The discover_table_columns() method and all caching logic were ditched.
Why? First of all, CI has a nice $this->db->list_fields(‘table_name’) method which does the same in a cross-database-implementation way. Secondly, there is a $query->list_fields() method which returns an array of field names from your query object without making any additional queries.
All in all, performance-wise you save one file read and lose one “SHOW COLUMNS FROM…” query for each table you .save() or .update(), but not .create() or find_*().
Some hacky benchmarking’s shown no difference, but the library got cleaner and there is no more “OMG, I changed my DB structure, but the old one stuck in the cache, and I forgot about that!”
No eval()‘s
All eval() statements were removed from the code. They were only slowing things and making the source hard to read.
New functionality
A new method was added: join_related() which JOINs all tables this one belongs_to and has_one.
For instance, let us imaging we have a people and groups tables. Each person belongs to a group. People table has three columns ‘id’,’group_id’ and ‘name’, while groups table has ‘id’ and ‘name’. You need to make a list of all people in the system and their group names.
You person model will look like this:
class Person extends ActiveRecord
{
function __construct ()
{
parent::ActiveRecord();
$this->_class_name = strtolower(get_class($this));
$this->_table = 'people';
$this->_belongs_to = array('groups');
}
}
Then somewhere in you controller:
$this->load->model('person');
$this->join_related();
$data['people'] = $this->person->find(ALL);
And, finally, your view:
<ul>
<?php foreach($people as $person): ?>
<li><?= $person->name ?> (<?= $person->group_name ?>)</li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
<ul>
Download
Download Version 0.3.2.1 of this library.