Creating, retrieving, updating and deleting data

This section illustrates how the Relational DAS can be used to create, retrieve, update and delete data in a relational database. Many of the examples are illustrated with a three-table database that contains companies, departments within those companies, and employees that work in those departments. This example is used in a number of places within the SDO literature. See the examples section of the » Service Data Objects specification or the Examples section of the documentation for the SDO extension.

The Relational DAS is constructed with metadata that defines the relational database and how it should be mapped to SDO. The long section that follows describes this metadata and how to construct the Relational DAS. The examples that follow it all assume that this metadata is in an included php file.

The examples below and others can all be found in the Scenarios directory in the Relational DAS package.

The Relational DAS throws exceptions in the event that it finds errors in the metadata or errors when executing SQL statements against the database. For brevity the examples below all omit the use of try/catch blocks around the calls to the Relational DAS.

These examples all differ from the expected use of SDO in two important respects.

First, they show all interactions with the database completed within one script. In this respect these scenarios are not realistic but are chosen to illustrate just the use of the Relational DAS. It is expected that interactions with the database will be separated in time and the data graph serialized and deserialized into the PHP session one or more times as the application interacts with an end user.

Second, all queries executed against the database use hard-coded queries with no variables substituted. In this case it is safe to use the simple executeQuery() call, and this is what the examples illustrate. In practice, though, it is unlikely that the SQL statement is known entirely ahead of time. In order to allow variables to be safely substituted into the SQL queries, without running the risk of injecting SQL with unknown effects, it is safer to use the executePreparedQuery() which takes a prepared SQL statement containing placeholders and a list of values to be substituted.