I think using a View for this is overkill, unless the data was accessed through means other than the page/program that is displaying this formatting (ie. there are multiple applications accessing the database).
Depending on how complicated you want your formatting, why not store each formatting data as a "template" in a table somewhere. Can use Dwoo (http://www.dwoo.org), and in PHP parse the string as DwooTemplate string. Obviously, you can use any template engine - Dwoo was just an example. Alternatively, can just store it as PHP code and eval(). Or for simple formatting, just store it as a sprintf() formatting string, and pass the arguments in a set order (you can use argument swapping if the display you want has them in a different order). On Nov 14, 11:56 am, "Aaron Cooper" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Howdy folks, > > I have a bit of a weird one, and it's more to do with design than coding of > any sort. > > To keep things simple: > > We have a MySQL table called display_type. This table is used to store config > data for a range of physical devices that do certain jobs. This table holds > Min Value, Max Value, Default Value, Unit. > > The data stored in this table can pertain to many devices that work with > different sets of variables. E.G. It could be a media player, where Min, Max > and Default Vals are volume settings. It could be a thermometer where Min, > Max and Default are temperature ranges for display purposes only. > > Because there is such a wide range of formats for this table, each with a > different way of displaying these values to the user, we also want to store a > display format for each record to use in printf or number_format functions in > the code. Not too different to how you format numbers in Excel. > > The table in question is more of a lookup table with a finite data > collection, although it will be added to as time goes by. It is maintained by > us, and us alone (no user input will reach it) > > All the values (Min, Max, Default and Current) are stored MySQL's decimal > format with 6 decimal places. > > Any ideas on the best way of storing formatting (and later using in PHP) > masks like this? > > Oh, and and by the way, the backend is being built on the Zend Framework if > anyone is aware of a nifty way one of those libraries can aid in this. > > Cheers > Aaron --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
