1. Requirements
2. Usage

The EAdvancedArBehavior extension takes away some of the complexities involved when saving objects, for example, with MANY_MANY and BELONGS_TO relations.

Requirements ¶

Built on Yii 1.1.6

Usage ¶

The EAdvancedArBehavior extension adds up some functionality to the default possibilites of yii´s ActiveRecord implementation.

To use this extension, just copy this file to your extensions/ directory, add 'import' => 'application.extensions.EAdvancedArBehavior', [...] to your config/main.php and add this behavior to each model you would like to inherit the new possibilities:

public function behaviors(){
      return array( 'EAdvancedArBehavior' => array(
            'class' => 'application.extensions.EAdvancedArBehavior'));
}

Depending on the functionallities you want to enable, you need to set some configuration parameters. This is described below.

Better support for MANY_MANY relations: ¶

Suppose you have a User and Project model having a MANY_MANY relation, for example:

User.php: ~~~ public function relations() {

 return array( .....
     'projects'        => array(self::MANY_MANY, 'Project', 'tbl_project_user(user_id, project_id)') );

} ~~~ Project.php: ~~~ public function relations() {

 return array( .....
     'users'        => array(self::MANY_MANY, 'User', 'tbl_project_user(project_id, user_id)') );

} ~~~

Now you can use it like ~~~ $user = User::model()->findBPk(12) ; $projects = Project::model()->findAll( $criteria ) ; $user->projects = $projects ; $user->save() ; ~~~

Remove relations like ~~~ $user->projects = array() ; // cleans up the relation table // or $user->delete() ; ~~~

Better support for BELONGS_TO relations: ¶

With this extension you can connect two related objects as follows:

$user = new User();
$user->company = Company::model()->find($conditions, $params);
$post->save();

Without this extension, you would have to do this as follows:

$user = new User();
$company = Company::model()->find($conditions, $params) ;
$user->company_id = $company->id ;
$post->save();

HAS_ONE and HAS_MANY ¶

Suppose a User HAS_ONE Address and HAS_MANY Emails, and Address/Email BELONGS_TO User (both have the foreignkey column user_id). So you can do now:

$user = new User() ;
$user->emails = array( $email1, $email2, ... ) ;
$user->address = $address ;
$user->save() ;

Set uninitialized column fields to NULL ¶

See: http://code.google.com/p/yiiext/downloads/detail?name=ensureNull_1.0.1.zip

Use it like

return array(
 'EAdvancedArBehavior' => array(
        'class' => 'application.extensions.EAdvancedArBehavior',
        'useOnUpdate' => false, // set empty fields to NULL only on inserts not updates
    ));

MySQL ONLY: Multiple timespans with CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ¶

Although the title of this section suggests something which cannot be done with MySQL, there is a nice workaround available. This extension provides the means to have a table with one column for the insert time and an other for the last modification time. First, add the following two columns to your table definition

  update_time timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00' ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
  created_time timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00',

Next, configure the following parameters

return array(
        'EAdvancedArBehavior' => array(
                'class' => 'application.extensions.EAdvancedArBehavior',
                'useNullOnTimestamp' => TRUE,         // set timestamps with a default value of 0000-00-00 00:00 to NULL (for inserts)
                'useOnUpdate' => true,                // required
                'onUpdateTimestamp'=>'update_time',   // column name of the update time
                ),
          );

ignoreRelationsExcept($array=null) ¶

To reduce unnecessary database queries, define the relations which are modified before save():

$model->ignoreRelationsExcept( array('company', 'address') ) ;
$model->save() ;

All relations are ignored except company and address

TODO ¶

add more functionalities (any AR suggestions are welcome!)