Form Generation Library

[eluser]ckm5[/eluser]
[quote author="Yednotek" date="1335980664"][quote author="ckm5" date="1335292044"]While I'm asking - does anyone have sample code for Datamapper ORM <-> Form Generation Library?

I realize I could spend many hours experimenting to find the answer, but if someone has a snippet handy it would be a big timesaver.

Thx.

ckm5[/quote]

Don't have any code for you, but ask yourself if you really need an ORM. I was thinking of going that route myself, but the learning curve and added complexity was just not worth it.

Using formgenlib (definitely worth it!) and smart coding of your models will get you a long way in most cases.[/quote]

Thanks, I figured it out. It's not that hard, took about two hours to get working - if I had had some examples, could have cut that down to 1/2 hour.

If anyone is wondering, here's an example.

Quick background - I have all the form data in an array* called $post. The data is contained in three different sub-arrays, the one in the example is $post['customer_attributes'], which is customer data (duh). Using DataMapper ORM, you can just feed your array into your db table object (which in my case is called, confusingly, customer_attributes) and call save.

Code:

// customer
$customer_attributes = new Customer();
foreach($post['customer_attributes'] as $key => $value) {
   $customer_attributes -> $key = $value;
}
$customer_attributes -> save();

If you want to update something in your table, this is what you might do (note - code wrapped for legibility, it's typically just one line)

Code:

$customer_attributes
      ->where('uuid =',$post['customer_attributes']['uuid'])
      ->update('reference_id',$customer_id);

The actual model file is just the normal Datamapper model:

Code:

<?php if (!defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');

class Customer extends DataMapper {

// rather specify a table as it makes things clearer for maintenance
var $table = 'customer';

    // Optionally, don't include a constructor if you don't need one.
    function __construct($id = NULL)
    {
        parent::__construct($id);
    }
    
    // Optionally, you can add post model initialisation code
    function post_model_init($from_cache = FALSE)
    {
    }
}

/* End of file customer.php */
/* Location: ./application/models/customer.php */
?>

I don't know if this saves a lot of other coding, but having all that work done is basically four lines of code is quite good... It's taken me more time to write this post than doing DB updates, and I'm all about saving time....

If you have any questions, happy to explain. It's really not difficult, but it's easy to over analyse how it works - bottom line, it just works.

ckm5

* as an aside, you need to be careful with FGL's get_post() as it breaks multi-dimensional arrays. Don't know if there's a way around it, but forms to multi-dimensional arrays is what I always use....