Can you use underscores in table names under the Kohana PHP framework (and how)?

Question

The underscore is a special character in Kohana and gets translated into a directory separator but since I have a bunch of existing code that uses underscores in table names, I want to know if it's possible to configure Kohana to understand that in some way.

Answer 1

One way to do this would be by putting your model classes in subdirectories of the Model folder.

For example, if you had a table called user_profiles, your directories would look like this:

application/
...classes/
......model/
.........user/
............profile.php

and profile.php would be like this:

<?php defined('SYSPATH') or die('No direct access.');

class Model_User_Profile extends ORM 
{
}

I would recommend going with the above approach (we use it at the company where I work), as it's the "standard" Kohana way of doing things, so you will have fewer hassles down the road. However, if you need to for some reason, you could also use the _table_name property of the ORM class (see docs here):

application/
...classes/
......model/
.........userprofile.php

and profile.php would be like this:

<?php defined('SYSPATH') or die('No direct access.');

class Model_UserProfile extends ORM 
{
    protected $_table_name = 'user_profiles'; // <== manually setting table name
}

This can also be helpful if your tables don't quite follow the singular vs. plural convention Kohana uses.

Answer 2

Underscores will be translated into directory separator, that's how kohana autoloading works. But, that's not really matters as you can define $_table_name properties in your model.

class Model_Profile extends ORM
{
    protected $_table_name = 'user_profiles';
}

Answer 3

Kohana doesnt replace underscores in table names. You can use everything you want in plain queries ($this->db->query($sql)), Database Query Builder ($this->from($table_name)->...->execute()) or any kind of AR (ORM, Sprig, Jelly - all of them allow you to set table_name property). Also you can use default (calculated from class name) table names as notJim described.

Answer 4

Yes, you can. Because your model name is the table name with last word pluralized by default. I mean that

Model_Foo_Bar {
}

will be foo_bars table which Kohana will try to find by default.