PHP: MVC and Model

Question

Hello

I`ve been wondering this one thing about creating models. If I make for example Page model. Is it the both: It can retrieve one row from the table or all the rows. Somehow Im mixing the objects and the database.

I have thought it like this: I would have to make a Page-class that would represent one row in the table. It also would have all the basic CRUD-methods.

Then I would have to do a Pages-class (somekind of collection) that would retrieve rows from the table and instantiate a Page object from each row. Is this kind of weird?

If someone could explain to me the idea of model throughout.. Im again confused.

Maybe Im thinking the whole OOP too difficult..

And by the way this forum is great. Hopefully people will just understand my problems. Heh. I was a long time procedural style programmer and now in 3 months I have dived into OOP and MVC and PHP frameworks and I just get more excited day by day when I explore this stuff!

Answer 1

Is it the both: It can retrieve one row from the table or all the rows.

You can use a model to interact with the database, there by you can do anything you like, for example getting one or more records, inserting records, updating, etc.

The way to go I would suggest you is to create a model for each of the distinct pages of your site that might interact with the database. You might want to create different functions inside a single model for a single page based on the page's requirements to interact with the database.

Answer 2

That depends on whether your Models represent instances or are just ORM objects.

If a Model represents an instance, then each record (row) in the database would become a new Model object. "All records" would simply be represented by an array of these objects. Ruby on Rails for example does it this way.

If your Model is rather an ORM object, it just represents the database as such and allows you to retrieve records from the database through it. The results may be in some container object or just a normal array. CakePHP for instance uses this method.