Question

I wanted to use code like this in my Zend Framework project:

public function indexAction() {
    $user = new User();
    $user->name = "Guest";
    $user->save();
}

The main thing that is important for me is that the class is called just User and not App_Model_User but how could I manage that?
I thought I could add the path to the file User.php in the model-folder to the include_path:

<?php
class User {
    /* Some code */
}

But how could I config the autoloader to load that file/class?
Currently I’m using the autoloader with the appnamespace (“App”) to load classes called App_Model_User which works but the class naming is not the right I think. It should be cleaner and clearer.

Answer 1

I use set_include_path as follows:

$root = dirname(dirname(__FILE__));

set_include_path(
    $root . '/application' . PATH_SEPARATOR
    . $root . '/library' . PATH_SEPARATOR 
    . $root . '/application/models' . PATH_SEPARATOR
    . $root . get_include_path()
);

Then the autoloader picks up any models (with any name) which I put in /application/models. The above is in my only public facing script (index.php). This is how I set up the autoloader:

$autoloader = Zend_Loader_Autoloader::getInstance();
$autoloader->setFallbackAutoloader(true);

The second line will ensure that your models do not have to be explicitly included. See:

http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.loader.autoloader.html