Comments on: Symfony Propel Enum types

By: ksn135

ksn135 — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:08:21 +0000

class Section extends BaseSection
{
  const TYPE_LIST      = 'list'
       ,TYPE_LINK      = 'link'
       ,TYPE_PAGE      = 'page'
       ,TYPE_VOTE      = 'vote'
       ,TYPE_AUTHORS   = 'authors'
 
// add new above this line
        ;
  static public function getValidTypesAsArray($context = null)
  {
    $results = array();
    $ext = new ReflectionClass('Section');
    $constants = $ext-&gt;getConstants();
    foreach($constants as $name =&gt; $value)
    {
      if (!strncmp($name,'TYPE_',5))
      {
        // i18n translation
        $results[$value] = myTools::__($value);
      }
    }
    if($context)
    {
      $event = new sfEvent($this, 'section.update_valid_types');
      $context-&gt;dispatcher-&gt;filter($event, $results);
      $results = $event-&gt;getReturnValue();
    }
 
    return $results;
  }
}

By: Jorge Chávez

Jorge Chávez — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:46:29 +0000

It’s too bad that not all DB support enum data types, but it’s nice to have at least some options to implement this.
A few weeks ago I was trying to use enum, but at the end I decided to go for the adding table option.
Perhaps the best possible solution yet is to simulate it like in this post.

By: Scott Meves

Scott Meves — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 18:41:19 +0000

@lawrence, I don’t use constants in this case because I wanted to have my user types stored in an array, and php doesn’t support “constant” arrays.

By: Lawrence Krubner

Lawrence Krubner — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 07:44:52 +0000

Scott, curious why you wouldn’t use constants? You write you pull the last trick for “a finite number of defined options *that will not change*.”

But then you put them in an array:

static protected $USER_TYPE_INTEGERS = array(‘student’, ‘supervisor’, ‘coordinator’, ‘researcher’, ‘admin’);

I like how fast and flexible this is. But wouldn’t constants better suggest that the intent was a fixed, unchanging, limited set? PHP arrays seem very flexible to me, even if you do apply the “protected” keyword. Seems like the only time I’d want to imitate an ENUM is when I wanted something that was not flexible.