Question

I am administering a system which is fairly old. It is a code soup at the moment and bit by bit I have been refactoring the code.

Something I noticed while doing this was that 90% of the queries were CRUD. No joins, nothing else. All really simple stuff.

As a result I created a model class which cover’s these types of query’s. I then extend the model class for each table.

class Model extends MySQLi {
    public function __construct() {
        global $site;
        $mysql = $site['mysql'];
        parent::__construct($mysql['host'], $mysql['user'], $mysql['pass'], $mysql['db']);
    }

I don’t like the use of the global but it does allow me to do this without having to worry about connection details.

<?php
class Contact extends Model {

    public $table = 'contact';

}

$Contact = new Contact;
$Contact->get(array('where'=>array('id >' => 4), 'limit' => array(0, 20));

My concern is that if a script requires 3 tables. I will be using 3 models and thus surely that means I will have 3 independent database connections? One for each class?

Is this going to be a problem like I think it will be?

Is there a work around which will allow me to continue to extend MySQLi and maybe pass it an active connection instead of connection details for it to make its own connection?

Answer 1

Do not extend Mysqli, just contain it in your model.

class Model {
    protected $db;

    public function __construct($db) {
        $this->db = $db;   // the mysqli instance.
    }
    .....
}