JTable Best Practice Question

[wvteijlingen]

Hello,

I'm currently developing a component for Joomla! 1.5. I have a database with a lot of tables, and a lot of them exist of composite primary keys. So far so good. But, as far as i can see from the API docs JTable only accepts one primary key. Now i can override the classes, but i'm wondering what the best practice is.

Thanks in advance,

Wouter

[permalink]

I generally use an auto increment primary key on tables with composite keys anyways. You can then use store() and delete() when you want to use the id, or you can override if you want to do things like delete a record by the composite key.

Nice thing about this is you can use it to delete all the records with any given 'piece' of your composite, by checking for nulls on one of the values making up your composite. Obviously if you have more than 2 values in your composite, you just add more

Code: Select all

function delete($id1, $id2){
	$query = 'DELETE FROM '.$this->getDBO()->nameQuote( $this->_tbl );
	if ($id2 == null){
		//delete all references to a table1 value
		$query .= ' WHERE id1 = '. $id1;
	} else if ($id1 == null){
		//delete all references to a table2 value
		$query .= ' WHERE id2 = '.$id2;
	}else{
		//delete a reference to a composite key join between table1 and table2
		$query .= ' WHERE id1 = '. $id1.' AND id2 = '.$id2;			
	}
	$this->getDBO()->setQuery( $query );

	if ($this->getDBO()->query())	{
			return true;
	}else{
		$this->setError($this->getDBO()->getErrorMsg());
		return false;
	}
}

[wvteijlingen]

Thanks. Extending the base class with new functionality is of course a normal thing to do in this case.