Important thing to keep in mind. Few days ago, Zend Framework 1.8 came out. It uses different auto loading approach. I did not had time to study it in detail so some things in /public/index.php file might look out of order. The parts where I auto-loaded Doctrine and models directory. Don’t worry, it’s working either way What you SHOULD do is CHANGE THE INCLUDE PATH line 28 of the index.php file to reflect your machine path to library folder.

Here are some screenshot of my final application:

Here is the screenshot of my library folder

DOWNLOAD toody (need to download Zend Framework and Doctrine ORM separatly).

Took me around 3 and a half hour to write the app, take the screenshots and write this post. Therefore, use it only in education purpose, cause there is much more to be done to use it for real.

Anyhow, to keep it short here is a great way to boost your data validation with Doctrine ORM. You simply turn on the appropriate attribute. In case of validation and data integrity we need to turn on the Doctrine::ATTR_VALIDATE attribute, like:

// $conn = Doctrine_Manager::connection(‘mysql://root:developer@localhost/typler’);
$conn->setAttribute(Doctrine::ATTR_VALIDATE, Doctrine::VALIDATE_ALL);

Now every time you try to do a $object->save() where you have empty or invalid data that map to your database table you will get Doctrine_Validator_Exception. Since exceptions are OOP oriented way of handling errors we can catch that exception and handle errors the way we want. You can use the instance method Doctrine_Validator_Exception::getInvalidRecords() for that. Doing so would return an ordinary array with references to all records that did not pass validation.

With Doctrine validation mechanism in place for Server side validation and a minor JavaScript for client side validation you can easily integrate good validation and integrity check in you web application.

I strongly recommend reading the official Doctrine Manual that you can download from Doctrine website. It’s quite well written. This post is merely a scratch of what you can find in the manual.

Doctrine ORM is mostly about objects, so how does Doctrine handle the last inert id for us? Upon $object->save() Doctrine sets that objects id property. So to get the last insert id we simply call the $object->id.

Keep in mind that by default Doctrine adds “id” property to object unless auto generated classes do not hold some other column name for primary field, or you manually assigned one.