Unless you really know what you are doing, you should avoid storing canonical data in serialized strings.
Though it has been done with very great results off the cakephp world. See how it is done at FriendFeeder: http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql Serialized data used as a denormalized data store. On Feb 8, 6:12 pm, bujanga <[email protected]> wrote: > Just some thinking and a question or two, please tell me if I am > totally off base. > > I would like to store multiple email addresses and phone numbers per > user. Using a serialized field might work for this. Is that a good > usage? > > Next, how does one validate the data and properly save and find the > data. Here is what I am thinking (not tested). > > Validate the Model using a custom validation function: > > var $validate = array( > 'emails' => array( > 'is_email' => array( > 'rule' => array('g_isEmail'), > 'required' => TRUE, > 'allowEmpty' => FALSE, > 'message' => 'You must enter at least 1 valid email > address' > ), > ), > ) > > function g_isEmail($check){ > if ( !isset($this->data['Model']['emails']) ){ > return FALSE; > } > if ( is_array($this->data['Model']['emails']) ){ > foreach( $this->data['Model']['emails'] as $email ){ > if ( !Validate::email($email) ) > return FALSE; > } > } > }elseif( !Validate::email($this->data['Model']['emails']) ) > return FALSE; > } > return TRUE; > > } > > Then using beforeSave to serialize the field and afterFind to > unserialize the field. > > Thanks, > > Gary Dalton Check out the new CakePHP Questions site http://cakeqs.org and help others with their CakePHP related questions. You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CakePHP" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php?hl=en
