Question

I’m a little confused as to how the model should ‘work’ in my basic C++ implementation, or rather how the data from say the database backend should be encapsulated/worked with.

My thoughts at the moment are for a model with for example a static findById() method, which would return an instance of that same model, which would then represent a single ‘row’ of data (permitting manipulation etc etc) might be a suitable approach.

In terms then of creating a new row in the database, I suppose a new instance of the model would be created, populated with data, and effectively a save() method called?

Hopefully I’m on the right lines, but am just a little confused over the implementation/design here.

Answer 1

So, I think you are asking what kind of interface would be appropriate to “translate” between a relational database and an object oriented application, particularly in the context of an MVC application written in C++.

A common approach is called object-relational mapping, or ORM. I’m only familiar with how Ruby on Rails implements ORM, but if you carry it over to C++ it looks like this:

• A database table maps to a class
• Operations on a table (such as queries) map to static member functions of the corresponding class
• Rows in a table correspond to instances of the corresponding class
• Fields in a table correspond to member variables of the corresponding class

There are probably C++ libraries to do the ORM mapping for you. I’m not familiar with any myself since I’ve never had to do this in C++.

Edit: This question asks about ORM libraries for C++.