Question

I’m developing a class for my PHP application. The code is being moved into a more OO approach with most of the logic residing in the class. Early on into the development of this, I created individual functions for pulling information from the database:

function getUserID($id)
function getMemberID($id)
function getUserEmailAddress($id)
function getUserFullName($id)
function getAnalysisConditionId($id)
...
etc.

I have lots of functions for pulling out individual field elements from within the database. In fact, I think I have a function for about 50% of the fields in my database. I’m starting to think this is a bit excessive and that this should be done another way.

I thought about building a function (like getUserInfo($id)) and in this function I would query all of the fields in the User table, including any joins related to return all of the relevant fields. I would then return an array of every field in the resulting table. Then if I needed this information somewhere in my application, I could just call it $class->getUserInfo($id)[‘id’].

Would this be the best way to do this? Should I even make every field available throughout my application? Thanks for your input!

Answer 1

You should check out one of several ORM solutions available out there. I’m a fan of Doctrine myself. Basically, they will manage all of this for you and often times they even will help you generate the accessor methods.