Best OOP Practices PHP/MySQL

Question

I am creating a word teacher:

I created a database with multiple tables:

TblTheme (themeId, name);<br>
TblGroup (groupId, name, themeIdFK);<br>
TblWeek (weekId, week, groupIdFK);<br>
tblWord (wordId, word, weekIdFK);<br>

So themeIdFK, groupIdFK and weekIdFK are Foreign keys.

In PHP i want to show all the themes. If a theme is pressed, show all the groups etc.. What classes should i create. (like classes Theme, group, week and word) and what is the best way to retrieve the data, without overloading the database?

Answer 1

First of all, if column holds same data, then it should have the same name:

Themes (theme_id, name);
Groups (group_id, name, theme_id);

Then when you create JOIN, you can write it as

SELECT 
   Themes.name AS theme,
   Groups.name AS group
FROM Themes 
LEFT JOIN Groups USING theme_id

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As for you original question: I would go with classes:

• Teacher - that would be your MVC model
• Word - used by model, holds you daily word and some additional info about it
• WordMapper - responsible for storing and retrieving instances of Word class

Basically this setup would implement DataMapper pattern .

There is no point in making a class per table, because the additional tables are only holding info about the Words. At lest that's how i see it.

Though, I'm not so sure if you need to make a complex App, just for making word-of-day thing.. maybe only as exercise.