I have a rather large PHP5 application that I'm building, using a MVC
approach with Firebird on the back-end for everything. Its incredibly fast,
and this is a dynamite technology combination!

I'm building classes that represent my data access to Firebird. All of my
access to the Firebird data is done through Stored Procedures, so I have
been able to abstract the tables in such a way that represents the 'business
objects' as best I can to map to PHP classes.

But as I get through this application, I'm starting to find the need to
create forms that work with multiple classes, or at least forms that work
with a main class by that the class has a one to many relationship with
other classes. I'm probably not saying this correctly, as this is more of a
relational model way of expressing it, but here's a typical example of what
I'm finding.

I have a 'Job' (Work Order) that is stored in a single table in Firebird,
and is represented as a single class called 'Job' in PHP. A job can have
one or many workers assigned to it. There is a class for 'Worker' that is a
single table in Firebird and a single class in PHP. There is a separate
table in Firebird representing the relationship between the Job and the
Workers assigned to it. This resolves a many to many relationship between
Jobs & Workers.

On my form in HTML, I have the job and all of its properties showing. But I
need a table within the form that shows all the Workers assigned to it.

When I look at the class of Job, I have singular properties (ie. Scheduled
date, Priority, etc.). That's all fine. But how do I represent the
collection of workers who are assigned to it? For me, its easy in a
relational world because I just create a join table and that's it. But how
is this represented in PHP as classes?

I'm sure this is pretty rudimentary stuff, but I'm curious as to how other
PHP-Firebird developers deal with this sort of thing. Are there any good
reference books on how to 'think' in regards to Object-Relational Mapping so
that I can follow some 'best practices' for this sort of thing and minimize
the amount of management code I have to write to pull all of this together?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Regards,
Myles


============================
Myles Wakeham
Director of Engineering
Tech Solutions US, Inc.
Scottsdale, Arizona USA
Phone (480) 451-7440
www.techsol.org