[Deprecated] DMZ 1.5.3 (DataMapper OverZealous Edition)

[eluser]BrianDHall[/eluser]
I have a suggestion/request that I think is relatively simple.

I had a bug I spent about 10 hours on and could not figure it out, and it turned out that it was this:

I had a model for Listing and Garagetype. In Listing it stated it has a has_one relation to 'garagetype', and in Garagetype I stated it has a has_many relationship to 'listings'.

It worked to save the relationship, but when I wanted to see what the related garagetype was for a given listing it just returned a garagetype with all null data fields. I wracked my brain and couldn't figure out was wrong, even with E_ALL and profiling turned on.

But you know what it was? I said it had a relationship to 'listings'....instead of 'listing'. This made it break, but with no error or notice or clear sign of what went wrong.

Could there be some way to let you know you did something wrong, like referenced a model that didn't exist, etc, to help make it clearer where to look when something breaks?

Whether it be an internal error/warning object or an outright thrown error, a judicious application of this would be really helpful to aide in hunting down those minor little errors that produce such big headaches.


...now, with that said, I did also want to take a moment to thank you for this great offering. It was my first attempt at ORM and, beyond the necessary learning curve and this little bug, I am really impressed.

My first commercial project (with CI, that is) used ActiveRecord, which was so much better than writing SQL by hand I thought CI was just great. Using DataMapper is at least a big an improvement, and perhaps much bigger. I intentionally kept my database suboptimally simple in the past because I wanted to avoid joins and sub-queries and nested references because they were just so hard, but now with DMZ I feel I can design the systems the way the information dictates they should be - and do so with the assurance that it won't cause a ton of work for me at a coding level.

And may I say, I think moving form validation into the models is just an awesome way to handle things. It has simplified my form creation tremendously, and its just a really great step-forward.

Thanks for all your work, it really puts to rest any concern I had that made me look at other frameworks.

-Brian