Question

I have been working over an year with Magento and have learned it good enough. Now I want to learn Zend, and I’m stuck with models.

I’m used to have entities and collection of entities in Magento, and it’s likely that I’ll want to use Zend_Db_Table, Zend_Db_Table_Row and/or Zend_Db_Table_Rowset. What I am confused of is the role each class.

I know that I can extend each class, and I understand that in my Product_Table class (that extends Zend_Db_Table_Abstract) it’s possible to have private methods that will tell Zend what classes to use for rows and rowsets, however I’m not feeling comfortable with it.

Having this code in Magento:

Example 1

// I understand that maybe I'll use the `new` keyword instead
// Mage::getModel() is only for exemplification
$product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product');
$product->setName('product name');
$product->setPrice(20);
$product->save();

if($id = $product->getId()){
    echo 'Product saved with id' . $id;
}
else{
    echo 'Error saving product';
}

Example 2

$collection = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->getCollection();
// this is the limit, I'm ok with other method's name
$collection->setPageSize(10);
$collection->load()

foreach($collection as $product){
    echo $product->getName() . ' costs ' . $product->getPrice() . PHP_EOL;
}

How I can implement something similar in Zend Framework? Alternatively if this is a really a bad idea, what are the best practices to implement models in Zend Framework?

Thanks

Answer 1

The Zend team, as mentioned elsewhere, thinks differently about the Model layer than most other PHP Framework creators. Their current thoughts on “the best” way to use their raw tools to provide a Database backed Entity Model can be found in the quick start guide.

That said, most people’s solution to Models in Zend Framework is bootstrapping Doctrine.