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Object is not instantiated for deep relationships in Codeigniter DataMapper ORM

From this example:

http://datamapper.wanwizard.eu/pages/getadvanced.html#Deep.Relationship.Include

You can see that it says: At this time, deep relationships do not support instatiation..

So if we have some methods defined in the Group model, it still can't be used unless we manually collect the field data and instantiate the group object ourselves.

I am interested in why it's not supported, is this something very difficult to achieve for an ORM?

Also, I would very much like to know if there is any easy workaround or how you solved this problem.

Solution

  • You can instantiate related objects when you use include_related(), but you can not instantiate deep relations ( like include_related('groups/users/posts/comments') ), the code simply doesn't support it.

    Remember that DataMapper has been around for quite a few years, and the current v1.x codebase still supports CodeIgniter 1.7. Which means it contains a fair amount of PHP4 legacy code.

    I'm busy designing DataMapper v2, which will address this issue.