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Giving up on Yii Oracle Clobs

July 24, 2012 — JaZahn

Started off yesterday with the intention of trying to implement functional Oracle Clobs in Yii similar to how I implemented it in CakePHP a couple years ago. As yesterday went on I kept busting through boundaries and was feeling great about my progress. But Then I hit the roadblock and I wasn’t able to continue. It’s not worth spending another couple days on when I have a deadline for a pilot by Fall. 4000 characters is enough for the pilot.

The result has been to alter the Yii COciSchema. Just changing the declaration of text to a varchar2(4000).

   public $columnTypes=array(
        'pk' => 'NUMBER(10) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY',
        'string' => 'VARCHAR2(255)',
        //'text' => 'CLOB',
        'text' => 'VARCHAR2(4000)',
        'integer' => 'NUMBER(10)',
        'float' => 'NUMBER',
        'decimal' => 'NUMBER',
        'datetime' => 'TIMESTAMP',
        'timestamp' => 'TIMESTAMP',
        'time' => 'TIMESTAMP',
        'date' => 'DATE',
        'binary' => 'BLOB',
        'boolean' => 'NUMBER(1)',
		'money' => 'NUMBER(19,4)',
    );

The issue is Yii (PDO) doesn’t support LOBs well at all, so that declaration didn’t make any sense to begin with.

Posted in ATG, Databases, Oracle, PHP, Quizmo, Yii. Tags: , , , , , . 1 Comment »

Writing a Style Guide

May 12, 2012 — JaZahn

I took a look at the style guides of all of the most popular frameworks.

Yii Style Guide
Codeigniter Style Guide
Zend Style Guide
Symfony Style Guide
CakePHP Style Guide

Yii is the simplest. They just tell you what should go in the Model, Controller and View. I actually believe that’s the best thing when thinking of a framework as a framework, since a framework shouldn’t be telling you how to write your code, and you should never be mixing your code within the framework. A framework is a tool, but it should be on the primary developer to decide on the style that’s right for them and their team. However, I do understand that most of these style guides are talking about their framework as a project, which of course it is

There are a lot of topics to consider in a style guide. A lot of things popped up as I looked at the different style guides that I hadn’t even considered.

File Names
Class Names
Method Names
Method Definition
Class and File Names Using Common Words
Database Table Names
Constants
Variable Names
Member Visibility (Private / Protected)
Indentation
Commenting
Control Structures
The PHP Tag
Comparing Return Values and Typecasting
Logical Operators
Debugging Code
PHP Errors
Whitespace
Linebreaks
Compatibility
One File per Class
Bracket and Parenthetic Spacing
Localized Text
One Statement per Line
Strings (When to use Single or Double quotes)
SQL Queries
Default Function Arguments
Associative Arrays
Unit Tests

Some of the style guides got so long I kind of got angry. Trying to enforce things like whitespace, logical operators or indentation is foolish. It’s just too much and it takes away from the things that are actually important.

So what’s actually important?

What’s important is what people are going to read. Nobody wants to read through a 30 page style guide, and they won’t. The best solution I’ve found is to have 2 style guides. The first, important style guide is to outline the very essential rules you want for your project. Try to keep it short enough to fit on one page so someone may actually read the whole thing. Then, if you choose, you can have a nitty gritty style guide that outlines how you want your variables named and if you’re an indent nazi. You can always refer back to the nitty gritty if someone is submitting code that you find repugnant.

My style guide for Quizmo
My nitty-gritty style guide for Quizmo

Posted in ATG, PHP. Tags: , , , , , , , . Comments Off on Writing a Style Guide »
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