DB layer 2.0

Note: This page is a work-in-progress. Feedback and suggested improvements are welcome. Please join the discussion on moodle.org or use the page comments.

Objectives

• Switch to prepared statements - using placeholders and preparing statements protects against sql injection
• Remove the need for data to be add/strip slashed all over the place in the code.
• Enable easier and productive unit tests.

Requirements

• 100% cross-db
• OOP implementation:
  • Full abstraction: Hide underlying libraries (adodb, pdo...) and drivers to Moodle developers completely.
  • Make it so that the database object can be subclassed - this means for unit tests that want to test database access, the test framework can override necessary methods
  • support both ? and :param parameter types
  • global $DB
• Easy to use (consistent and similar to current dmllib 1.0)
• Easy to migrate (provide documentation and utilities to help on that)
• Complete unit testing (self)
• Easy unit testing (moodle)
• Well documented (PHPDocs + use examples)
• Tasks, bugs and progress tracked in MDL-14679
• Due date: N/D

Meetings

• MDM-20080501 Dmllib 2.0 - Penny, Petr and Eloy.
• MDM-20080508 Dmllib 2.0 - Penny, Petr, Nicolas and Eloy.
• MDM-20080513 Dmllib 2.0 - Penny, Petr, Nicolas and Eloy.

Ideas

• Object Relational Mapping style
• There are already some PHP ORM tools:
  • Doctrine
  • PHP Object Generator
  • Propel