PHP Active Record Class

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Beware that the code listed here has numerous bugs and is only intended for research purposes. Please contact me if you are interested in a newer, more polished version.

I had seen and heard a lot about Active Record and wanted to have some fun with it. As I'm mostly a PHP guy, I decided to roll out my own class. This is what I came up with. It never really made it to production so it's probably a bit rough, but I've learned a lot about the internals of AR and frankly, had a lot of fun programming this. It has support for renderer class extensions (ie: to generate an xml output), in model validation functions, etc. I've used the occasion to get accustomed with xDebug, the PHP remote debugger. You can view a live example here (reload to see the effect).

Note that this is test code and the errors are expected for debugging. See attached file for the source.

Usage Example

<?php
/**
 * Define a table model
**/
class activeRecordTest extends tableAbstract
{
    public $rootXPath = '/appData/pageData';
    
    function __construct(tableRenderer &$renderer = null)
    {
        $this->_init(__CLASS__, $renderer);
    }
    
    protected   function onCreate()
    {
        $tableName  = $this->myName;
        $tableSQL   = <<<SQL
CREATE TABLE `${tableName}` (
  `id` mediumint(8) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `login` varchar(128) character set latin1 NOT NULL,
  `password` varchar(45) character set latin1 NOT NULL,
  `email` varchar(255) character set latin1 NOT NULL,
  `created` datetime NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=0 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci
SQL;
        
        return $tableSQL;
    }
        
    public  function loginExists($login)
    {
        if ($this->fetchRow(HP('limit', 1)) > 0) return true;
        else return false;
    }
    
    /**
     * Custom, auto-called, field validation function
    **/
    protected function validate_login($data)
    {
        if (rand(0, 1) == 0) return true;
        else return false;
    }
} // END table model Pages


$myTest             = new activeRecordTest(new xmlRenderer);
$myTest->login      = 'User';
$myTest->password   = 'password';

// Use of a custom model method
echo 'User jdoe <b>' . (($iExists = $myTest->loginExists('jdoe')) ? 'exists' : 'doesn\'t exist') . "</b>\n";

if ($myTest->fetchAll() == 0 || !$iExists)
{
    $myTest->email      = 'jdoe@example.org';
    $myTest->password   = sha1('jdoe');
    $myTest->login      = 'jdoe';
    
    if ($myTest->saveData())
    {
        echo '<b>Saved data 1</b>' . "\n";
    } else {
        echo '<b style="color red">Failed to save 1</b>' . "\n";
    }
}

$myTest->fetchRows(HP('fieldName', '*'));
?>

<pre>

<h2>tableRenderer generated XML</h2><hr />

<?php

echo htmlentities($myTest->render(true));

?>
</pre>