introduction of magic column names

Hi everybody,

I was wondering if you are thinking about introducing some 'magic field names' like they are available in rails.

http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/MagicFieldNames

It is quite straight forward to add the handling of updated_on and created_on into the template and my uestion is, if this is something worth adding to the core functionality.

Just my 2 cent.

Best regards,
A.L.

Ok, I posted it here:

<http://www.qcodo.com/downloads/item.php/65>

However, I screwed up the title. Can you rename it to:
Automatically populating creation and modification dates

Best regards,
A.L.

Moschen... thanks for your contribution.  I've gone ahead and renamed it as you asked.

Visor, what are you referring to when you say that the “post code hints have disappeared”?

Finally, while I think that this is very useful functionality (i'll likely use it myself!), in general I think it's a good philosophy to have the core templates which are distributed with qcodo do as little modification to the pure data as possible, just so that devs (especially newbies) aren't surprised by anything.

As Gavin points out, the power of Qcodo is to be able to customize/override anything, including templates -- so i think your custom object_save.tpl is a great modification which everyone can take advantage of... but i think for now, we'll leave it as an optional add-on for people to use if they wish.

Thanks for sharing it with the community!

Moschen, thanks for that piece of code. I will definitely be using it in upcoming applications - but with the magic column names changed to suit my needs of course.

I guess I like configuration better than convention.

Regards

Gavin

Hi everybody,

as I wasn't too happy with my first solution (it was just not generic enough :-) ), I spend some more time on it and would like to know your opinion.

Here is the new approach:

There will be two new variables that you can set in your _configuration.inc:

// Define column name which will be used to automatically set the last modification timestamp.
// The framework will automatically use that column, when it is available. If it is not available
// in a table, it will be ignored.
define('MAGIC_COLUMN_NAME_MODIFICATION_DATE','modification_date');

// Like MAGIC_COLUMN_NAME_MODIFICATION_DATE, only that this timestamp will be set on creation of
// a new record.
define('MAGIC_COLUMN_NAME_CREATION_DATE','creation_date');

The new object_save.tpl template will then pick up this information and generate the code for filling these columns if they are defined.

I think this way it's much easier. If you want I can upload the script as a new version.

Best regards,
A.L.