I’m building a web app and would like to use an ORM to map the data from db with objects.
I have been struggling with this for a few days, and tried various implementations, including: Codeigniter ORM, Kohana ORM, PHP.ActiveRecords and Doctrine.
The last two I can’t really use, because they depend on PHP 5.3 which is not installed (and can not be) on my shared hosting server.
The problem with all these ORM-s is inheritance (except for Doctrine, but I can’ use it).
I know a lot of developers just do db-s without inheritance, but here is my problem:
My db needs to be multilingual, I designed my db by the following example:
Table Product -> id, category_id, price... (everything that is not translatable)
Table ProductTranslation-> id, language_id, name, description... (same id as product, adds language FK, and fields that are translatable)
Maybe there is a better approach, but I really like this, because its very flexible (can add new languages) and does not put a lot of NULL-s in the db, also joining is not that costly because the tables are relatively small (unlike the approach to put all translations in a single table, and reference that table from all other tables).
The only workaround, I found, to support ORMs is to put a has_one relation between
Product->ProductTranslation.
This way I could access the translated fields with something like:
DB::get_product_by_id(4)->translation->name
Nevermind the syntax, but the real problem with this approach is that I have to define new objects(models) for translation tables, and logically they don’t belong there. They are not entities, just additional data for the entities.
So, my question here are:
- Is there a better way to organize languages in the db, which is more ORM friendly ?
- Are there any other PHP ORM-s (<5.3) which support inheritance ? – Btw. I found the Kohana ORM ihertiance module but it seems out-of-date, and doesn’t work with the current framework version
- Are there any other workaround for the inheritance problem?
Doctrine 2.0 requires PHP 5.3, but Doctrine 1.2.x works fine on PHP 5.2.3 or newer.