Question

I want to generate this complex WHERE clause in Zend_Db:

SELECT * 
FROM 'products' 
WHERE 
    status = 'active' 
    AND 
    (
        attribute = 'one' 
        OR 
        attribute = 'two' 
        OR 
        [...]
    )
;

I’ve tried this:

$select->from('product');
$select->where('status = ?', $status);
$select->where('attribute = ?', $a1);
$select->orWhere('attribute = ?', $a2);

and that produced:

SELECT `product`.* 
FROM `product` 
WHERE 
    (status = 'active') 
    AND 
    (attribute = 'one') 
    OR 
    (attribute = 'two')
;

I did figure out one method of making this work but I felt it was sort of ‘cheating’ by using PHP to combine the “OR” clauses first and then combine them using Zend_Db where() clause. PHP code:

$WHERE = array();
foreach($attributes as $a):
    #WHERE[] = "attribute = '" . $a . "'";
endforeach;
$WHERE = implode(' OR ', $WHERE);

$select->from('product');
$select->where('status = ?', $status);
$select->where($WHERE);

That produced what I was looking for. But I’m curious if there’s an “official” way of getting that complex WHERE statement (which really isn’t too complex, just adding some parenthesis) with using the Zend_Db tool, instead of combining it in PHP first.

Cheers!

Answer 1

This would be the ‘official’ way to get you the parentheses as specified (see Example #20 in the Zend_Db_Select documentation):

$a1 = 'one';
$a2 = 'two';
$select->from('product');
$select->where('status = ?', $status);
$select->where("attribute = $a1 OR attribute = $a2");

So, what you are doing does seem reasonable, given that you do not know how many attributes you have ahead of time.