Question

My boss wants the application we are currently working on to be split across several schemata in the database, because he wants multiple applications — some of which I have no control over — to be able to access the data, following a naming convention like DeploymentPrefix_Category. For instance, there’d be a few schemata for production, Production_Foo, Production_Bar, and Production_Baz, and then the same for staging Staging_Foo, Staging_Bar, and Staging_Baz, and the same for development.

The problem is that while Zend_Db_Table lets me specify a schema, it doesn’t seem to let me generate that schema on the fly, which I would need to do to put that prefix on the schema.

What’s the best way to handle that?

Answer 1

The issue of different configs for different environments is easily handled with Zend_Config. See the section on config in the quickstart:

http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/learning.quickstart.create-project.html

This allows you to specify different settings for each environment.

As for the schemas, I’m guessing you have some tables that live in Production_Foo and others that live in Production_Bar. Consider extending Zend_Db_Table for each of these schemas and pointing to the correct database at the time of construction.

Zend_Db_Table’s constructor is defined as follows:

public function __construct($config = array(), $definition = null)
    { ... }

When we follow through to see where $definition leads it allows you to pass an array that is loaded into Zend_Db_Table_Definition. One of the options for this is the table name:

/**
 * @param string $tableName
 * @param array  $tableConfig
 * @return Zend_Db_Table_Definition
 */
public function setTableConfig($tableName, array $tableConfig)
{
    // @todo logic here
    $tableConfig[Zend_Db_Table::DEFINITION_CONFIG_NAME] = $tableName;
    $tableConfig[Zend_Db_Table::DEFINITION] = $this;

    if (!isset($tableConfig[Zend_Db_Table::NAME])) {
        $tableConfig[Zend_Db_Table::NAME] = $tableName;
    }

    $this->_tableConfigs[$tableName] = $tableConfig;
    return $this;
}

As for your schema, you just pass in different set of options for the db adapter that points to the correct one.