"Stut" <stuttle@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:452F5DA6.9070103@gmail.com...
> Ed Lazor wrote:
>> On Oct 12, 2006, at 4:36 PM, Stut wrote:
>>> If I then go on to create an admin interface for the users, I would
>>> create another completely separate class called UserCollection to handle
>>> more than one user. I may at that point choose to expose any
>>> data-massaging methods in User to UserCollection to avoid code
>>> duplication, but that would be the extent of the way UserCollection uses
>>> the User class since the User class is optimised to work on a single
>>> user at any one time.
>>
>> We use a similar approach for the user class. I haven't ever implemented
>> something like the UserCollection class though. I'm curious about that.
>> Does your UserCollection class extend the basic user class? Or is it
>> something else entirely; I dunno, maybe UserCollection has a property
>> defined as an array of User class? I think that's what people were
>> saying earlier in the thread as being a "very bad thing" in terms of
>> memory utilization, etc.
>
> Indeed, that would be a very bad thing, unless you've already considered
> that. I've previously mentioned that I have an ActiveRecord-style
> implementation for a lot of my DB access. The base class for that system
> has a static function called FindAll which will return an array of
> objects. However, it only does a single SQL statement. The base class also
> has a method LoadFromArray which, shockingly, loads the object from an
> array. This means that from a single DB request I can get an array of
> objects each representing one entitity (potentially a row, but not
> necessarily).
The very idea of one object per row makes me want to throw up. I have one
object per table, and each object can deal with any number of rows. I don't
use getters and setters to access the columns from any row, I simply input
an array (typically one row from the $_POST array) and output an array which
may contain any number of rows. I find this to be far easier and no less
efficient.
--
Tony Marston
http://www.tonymarston.net
http://www.radicore.org