user151841 - Page 2 - Developer IT

guarantee child records either in one table or another, but not both?

- by user151841

I have a table with two child tables. For each record in the parent table, I want one and only one record in one of the child tables -- not one in each, not none. How to I define that? Here's the backstory. Feel free to criticize this implementation, but please answer the question above, because this isn't the only time I've encountered it: I have a database that holds data pertaining to user surveys. It was originally designed with one authentication method for starting a survey. Since then, requirements have changed, and now there are two different ways someone could sign on to start a survey. Originally I captured the authentication token in a column in the survey table. Since requirements changed, there are three other bits of data that I want to capture in authentication. So for each record in the survey table, I'm either going to have one token, or a set of three. All four of these are of different types, so my thought was, instead of having four columns where either one is going to be null, or three are going to be null ( or even worse, a bad mashup of either of those scenarios ), I would have two child tables, one for holding the single authentication token, the other for holding the three. Problem is, I don't know offhand how to define that in DDL. I'm using MySQL, so maybe there's a feature that MySQL doesn't implement that lets me do this.

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A self-creator: What pattern is this? php

- by user151841

I have several classes that are basically interfaces to database rows. Since the class assumes that a row already exists ( __construct expects a field value ), there is a public static function that allows creation of the row and returns an instance of the class. Here's a pseudo-code example : class fruit { public $id; public function __construct( $id ) { $this->id = $id; $sql = "SELECT * FROM Fruits WHERE id = $id"; ... $this->arrFieldValues[$field] = $row[$value]; } public function __get( $var ) { return $this->arrFieldValues[$var]; } public function __set( $var, $val ) { $sql = "UPDATE fruits SET $var = $val WHERE id = $this->id"; } public static function create( $id ) { $sql = "INSERT INTO Fruits ( fruit_name ) VALUE ( '$fruit' )"; $id = mysql_insert_id(); $fruit = & new fruit($id); return $fruit; } } $obj1 = fruit::create( "apple" ); $obj2 = & new fruit( 12 ); What is this pattern called? Edit: I changed the example to one that has more database-interface functionality. For most of the time, this kind of class would be instantiated normally, through __construct(). But sometimes when you need to create a new row first, you would call create().

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self-destructing objects in php5?

- by user151841

I am working on a class in php that is basically an interface to a database row. I wanted to create a delete() method that would 1. delete the database row and 2. destroy the instance of itself so that further attempts to manipulate the row via the object would throw warnings. Doing some googling, it seems that, in php5, it's not possible for an object to unset itself. http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=36971 In fact they discuss the very situation I was wanting to do :( So how should I proceed? I could make boolean flag as a class property, for whether the row still exists, and have each operation check that flag and throw an error if the row has been deleted. This maintains the oo structure of code, so I would have $objDbRow->delete(); But then I have to put checks at the beginning of each method. Or, I could implement a __destruct method that deletes the row. But that would seem counter-intuitive to me; if I saw in code unset($objDbRow); All I would suspect that's happening is that the object is being discarded, not that a row is being deleted. So that to me would seem like bad practice.

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finding if an anniversary is coming up in n days in MySql

- by user151841

I have a table with anniversary dates. I want a query that returns me rows of anniversaries coming up in the next 10 days. For instance: birthdate --------- 1965-10-10 1982-05-25 SELECT birthdate FROM Anniversaries WHERE mystical_magical_mumbo_jumbo <= 10 +------------+ | birthdate | +------------+ | 1982-05-25 | +------------+ 1 row in set (0.01 sec) I'd like to keep the query in the form x <= 10, because I'll use that number 10 in other parts of the query, and if I set it to a variable, I can change it once everywhere by changing the variable, and not have to re-write the query.

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SELECT DISTINCT on a field not appearing in recordset?

- by user151841

I want to do a SELECT DISTINCT guid, ..., but I don't want guid appearing in the recordset. How do I do this?

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php: avoiding __get in certain circumstances?

- by user151841

I have a class where I'm using __set. Because I don't want it to set just anything, I have an array of approved variables that it checks before it will actually set a class property. However, on construct, I want the __construct method to set several class properties, some of which are not in the approved list. So when construct happens, and I do $this->var = $value, I of course get my exception that I'm not allowed to set that variable. Can I get around this somehow?

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