The PHPDS_db and PHPDS_query classes needs to support named SQL parameters, this will help future compatibility with PDO Objects as well as allow for the formatting of SQL statements to be improved upon before we fully support PDO.
An example of currently used non-parameter based queries:
$sql = "INSERT INTO sometable (foo, bar, baz) VALUES (%d, '%s', '%s')"
To add data into the query you would then usually do something like:
$query = sprintf($sql, 1, 'text', 'some more text');
Although the above example is extremely simple, the ordering of the parameters is extremely important and in complex queries with many fields it is easy to misalign the format parameters with the fields given.
To solve this problem PDO supports named SQL parameters (as does most other non PHP mysql database API's):
Example:
$sql = "INSERT INTO sometable (foo, bar, baz) VALUES (:foo, ':bar', ':baz')"
For now, a PHPDevShell a function could then take a named array and simply replace the named parameters with the actual values, for example:
$query = $this->fmtParamSQL($sql, array(':foo' => 1, ':bar' => 'text', ':baz' => 'some more text'));
The fmtParamSQL() function can work like this:
function fmtParamSQL($sql, $params = false) {
$result = $sql;
foreach($params as $name => $value) {
$result = str_ireplace(':'.$name, $value, $result);
}
return $result;
}
I propose that we build an additional function into PHPDS_db called invokeNamedQuery() to differentiate between the standard invokeQuery() function and a function which supports named parameters. This is going to take quite a lot of work since all the supporting functions will also then have to support named parameters.
If we convert all queries to named queries eventually we will then be able to support PDO and NoSQL much easier in the future.
As per our discussion, experiment with solution, we will then hold a global communication and dicscuss our direction.