Question

This is going to take a bit to explain. I’m creating my first real-world web application, and I’d to do it properly. I have very little PHP experience, but vast experience in other languages so technical skill isn’t a problem, it’s more conventions of the language. I’m following the MVC pattern, and I am at the stage where I’m implementing user registration for the application.

To standardise connections to the database, I’ve created a Config class with a static getConnection method, which creates a mysqli connection object. This isn’t a problem, it’s the next bit that is.

To make my classes a bit more readable, I have various functions built into them that make database calls. For example, my User class has a getFriends method like so:

class User
{
   public $id;

   public getFriends()
   {
      return UserController::getFriends($id);
   }
}

But as it stands now, if I implement it that way, it means creating a connection for every query on a page, probably many times in a single script, which is just horrific.

I was thinking about doing the same as above, but pass getFriends a mysqli object, which in turn passes one to UserController::getFriends as well, but that feels messy, and frankly poor form, even though it would guarantee only one connection per script, a much better improvement.

I also thought about scrapping the idea of keeping the methods inside User altogether, and instead making calls like UserController::getFriends($connection, $id) directly in the script, with a single $connection declared at the beginning, in place of user->getFriends(). That seems like the absolute cleanest, nicest solution, but I’m unsure.

So, essentially, how do PHP folks normally do this sort of thing?

Answer 1

What I do in my MVC framework is create a db connection and assign it to the Model base class (in the config):

$db = new database\adapters\MySQL(...);
if ( !$db->connected() ) {
  exit('Ewps!');
}

database\Model::dbObject($db);

Then later on, anywhere, I can use:

User::getFriends(13);

because User extends Model and Model has access to $db: self::dbObject()

If I need my raw db connection, I either use Model::dbObject() or $GLOBALS['db'], but I rarely do need the raw connection, because all db logic should be in your Models.

• https://github.com/rudiedirkx/Rudie-on-wheels/blob/master/example_app/config/database.php
• https://github.com/rudiedirkx/Rudie-on-wheels/blob/master/example_app/models/User.php#L30