On 07/09/2007, at 8:47 AM, Bill Karwin wrote:
Natural outer joins are not supported in Zend_Db_Select because
they were thought to be an uncommon use case.
There are at least two very easy workarounds: specify the join
condition in the joinLeft() method, or else skip use of
Zend_Db_Select entirely, and instead write your SQL as a string and
execute it with $db->query().
Zend_Db_Select was never intended to support every permutation of
SQL syntax (example: UNION is not supported at all). It was
intended to make it easy to construct queries procedurally for the
80% most common cases.
I agree the code for joinLeftNatural() you showed is not a big
deal, but that's only one-third of the required work. There are
also unit tests and documentation to write. Needs to be tested on
all supported databases. Some RDBMS brands may not support natural
joins, etc. The effort for these things has a way of expanding.
I don't know why Zend_Db_Select is not as friendly as it could be
for extending. I can guess that because of the "80%" principle,
the answer is, "you shouldn't be extending it. If you have an
uncommon case, then write your SQL yourself."
We will probably not add this method to Zend_Db_Select. Feel free
to enter a request, but it will be very low priority, since there
are such straightforward workarounds available.
Hi bill. thats fine ill just use normal join syntax with join field
statements where it applies. I have the subclass working, but it
could BC break in the future so rather not go down that path.
I do however feel, that packages within an API should be able to be
extended really unless they are final preventing subclassing.
