Was it Taylor Otwell himself or some company or someone else?
I am just curious and wanted to know. There is nothing to it in first page of google search so I posted the question here.
Maybe this will be down voted immediately. In that case I will delete it.
In software engineering, the active record pattern is an architectural pattern found in software that stores in-memory object data in relational databases. It was named by Martin Fowler in his 2003 book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.1 The interface of an object conforming to this pattern would include functions such as Insert, Update, and Delete, plus properties that correspond more or less directly to the columns in the underlying database table.
The active record pattern is an approach to accessing data in a database. A database table or view is wrapped into a class. Thus, an object instance is tied to a single row in the table. After creation of an object, a new row is added to the table upon save. Any object loaded gets its information from the database. When an object is updated, the corresponding row in the table is also updated. The wrapper class implements accessor methods or properties for each column in the table or view.
This pattern is commonly used by object persistence tools and in object-relational mapping (ORM). Typically, foreign key relationships will be exposed as an object instance of the appropriate type via a property.
Resource: Laravel Up And Running book from Matt Stauffer
then you can find it even here.
So Taylor only used this pattern to implement in Laravel framework even though many they consider that as a weak part of Laravel.
Related
I want to store changes to all fields in Eloquent model into database.
I can do it using created and updated events but there is a problem with multiple foreign relations (described as separate tables).
Example:
User
login
Roles -> hasMany
When I update login field it is easy to write old and new value into database, but when I update Roles relation nothing happens.
How can I track all foreign relations (like hasMany, hasManyThrough, ManyToMany)?
Owen-it has a very nice Library called laravel-auditing, which keeps an easy to query list of all changes that are made to a model, and I think it does quite an awesome piece of work. Have used it and it is worth it to try out.
There is no embedded and simple method to do it.
Eloquent doesn't provide any method to implement observers on related models by design. Many proposal in this way have been rejected by Taylor (just one example).
The only thing you can do, is to create your own methods to do it.
You have many possibilities, here are some of them in order of complexity (some of them are "dirty" :-)
add a created and updated observer on each related model
override the save() or create your own saveAndFire() method on your eloquent instances, and from that method retrieve the parent and call its log methods before saving. (this is a little bit "dirty" imho)
encapsulate all your persistence layer and fire events yourself on saving objects (look at the repository pattern, for example)
Let's say we are structuring an application with MVC (also, Stores/Services). SQL is used as the persistence mechanism. And memory efficiency is a major concern.
Obviously, we should take advantage of SQL queries and only ask for fields of our Model in theory object when they are needed.
For example, an mobile app may need to display a list of title for articles, while the body of the article doesn't get displayed until user taps on a specific title. In this case, we ask SQL for just the titles first.
The question is, what should the model object look like?
The solutions I can think of are:
Enhance the model with some states that indicate which fields are populated. This could also be archived by using nil/NULL/None values on unpopulated fields of the model object.
Split the theoretical model to multiple classes. Following the previous example, we could have an Article class and an ArticleDetail class, with a one-to-one relation.
Forget the Store object, let each model object lazy evaluate it's costly fields. The model would have to know about its persistence mechanism.
This should be a common problem. How do the ORM in your favorite frameworks/libraries resolve it? Any best practices?
I am currently working on a project where we are rewriting software that was originally written in Visual DataFlex and we are changing it to use SQL and rewriting it into a C# client program and a C#/ASP.Net website. The current database for this is really horrible and has just had columns added to table or pipe(|) characters stuck between the cell values when they needed to add new fields. So we have things like a person table with over 200 columns because stuff like 6 lots of (addressline1, addressline2, town, city, country, postcode) columns for storing different addresses (home/postal/accountPostal/ect...).
What we would like to do is restructure the database, but we also need to keep using the current structure so that the original software can still work as well. What I would like to know is would it be possible using Linq to write a DataContext Object Model Class that could sort of interpret the data base structures so that we could continue to use the current database structure, but to the code it could look like we where using the new structure, and then once different modules of the software are rewritten we could change the object model to use the correct data structure???
First of all, since you mention the DataContext I think you're looking at Linq to SQL? I would advice to use the Entity Framework. The Entity Framework has more advanced modeling capabilities that you can use in a scenario as yours. It has the ability to construct for example a type from multiple tables, use inheritance or complex types.
The Entity Framework creates a model for you that consists of three parts.
SSDL which stores how your database looks.
CSDL which stores your model (your objects and the relationships between them)
MSL which tells the Entity Framework how to map from your objects to the database structure.
Using this you can have a legacy database and map this to a Domain Model that's more suited to your needs.
The Entity Framework has the ability to create a starting model from your database (where all tables, columns and associations are mapped) en then you can begin restructuring this model.
These classes are generated as partial so you could extend them by for exampling splitting the database piped fields into separate properties.
Have you also thought about using Views? If possible you could at views to your database that give you a nicer dataschema to work with and then base your model on the views in combination with stored procedures.
Hope this gives you any ideas.
I am wondering how the models in code ignitor are suposed to be used.
Lets say I have a couple of tables in menu items database, and I want to query information for each table in different controllers. Do I make different model classes for each of the tables and layout the functions within them?
Thanks!
Models should contain all the functionality for retrieving and inserting data into your database. A controller will load a model:
$this->load->model('model_name');
The controller then fetches any data needed by the view through the abstract functions defined in your model.
It would be best to create a different model for each table although its is not essential.
You should read up about the MVC design pattern, it is used by codeigniter and many other frameworks because it is efficient and allows code reuse. More info about models can be found in the Codeigniter docs:
http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/general/models.html
CodeIgniter is flexible, and leaves this decision up to you. The user's guide does not say one way or the other how you should organize your code.
That said, to keep your code clean and easy to maintain I would recommend an approach where you try to limit each model to dealing with an individual table, or at least a single database entity. You certainly want to avoid having a single model to handle all of your database tables.
For my taste, CodeIgniter is too flexible here - I'd rather call it vague. A CI "model" has no spec, no interface, it can be things as different as:
An entity domain object, where each instance represents basically a record of a table. Sometimes it's an "anemic" domain object, each property maps directly to a DB column, little behaviour and little or no understanding of objects relationships and "graphs" (say, foreign keys in the DB are just integer ids in PHP). Or it can also be a "rich (or true) domain object", with all the business intelligence, and also knows about relations: say instead of $person->getAccountId() (returns int) we have $person->getAccount(); perhaps also knows how to persist itself (and perhaps also the full graph or related object - perhaps some notion of "dirtiness").
A service object, related to objects persistence and/or general DB querying: be a DataMapper, a DAO, etc. In this case we have typically one single instance (singleton) of the object (little or no state), typically one per DB table or per domain class.
When you read, in CI docs or forums, about , say, the Person model you can never know what kind of patter we are dealing with. Worse: frequently it's a ungly mix of those fundamentally different patterns.
This informality/vagueness is not specific to CI, rather to PHP frameworks, in my experience.
What exactly is an active record? I hear this term used in Ruby post and nhibernate.
Active record was initially a design pattern which involved wrapping database table operations in a class.
In a Rails context, however, it is also the proper name of a particular software component which implements the design pattern in Ruby for object-relational mapping, and the name of its associated module.
Active record is a design pattern where you map each table to a class. This means that each object created from this class represents a row in the table.
http://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/activeRecord.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_record_pattern
It s a Design Pattern.
http://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/activeRecord.html