RE: [PHP-DB] Database abstract layer

WE use XML here to store the values, however our requirements also add the ability to use mutiple languages so its a little more complex. For personal projects I store the various data like this into a system_option table as text (1,Male;2,Female;) and then have a common routine that grabs the required bits of info from this table and passes it thru a framework when creating the appropriate html. The framework is a series fucntions that get passed the various bits of data (like what the field type is (date, text, radio etc), the value from the db, the system_option value for that element and combines it all into an html snippet that is then shown to the user. Bastien

From: Vignesh M P N <manivig@iit.edu> To: php-db@lists.php.net Subject: [PHP-DB] Database abstract layer Date: Tue, 07 Nov 2006 15:19:26 -0600 Hi I am facing a common problem which any developer querying the database would face. In our web applications wherever we have more than one standard options for a field, we usually denote them as integers. Say, for gender, we store it as 1 or 2, but we display that as male or female in the user interface. So far I had been handling this translation in the presentation layer ie., just before displaying the data in the table, I check if the retrieved is "1" and then translate it to "male" and so on. But this becomes clumsy when we have lots of such standard options and when we need this translation in multiple places in the application. So now I am thinking of adding an abstract layer which does all the querying, retrieving and translation; and then return to my presentation layer, so that if my presentation layer just calls a function in the database abstract layer with the required query parameters, it gets back a resultset with the translations. I hope this is a very common problem every developer faces. I would like to have your guidance on this. I understand that a resultset object is not easy to replicate. How do I make these translations and store them back in an object and return it to the presentation layer? Or do we have existing PHP libraries which serve this purpose? Could you suggest me a better way of solving this problem? Please help me on this. Thanks Vignesh.

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