Something that I've found really helpful in C# is the DateTime object and how it can be natively mapped to NHibernate classes and then straight to the database.

The equivalent Doctrine code is almost as elegant. Here's an excellent example of when objects abstract you from the nitty-gritty string parsing code that would be required to do time-stamping in a database:

 
$today = new Zend_Date();
$newPost = new Post();
 
$newPost->title = 'posting for ' . $today->get(Zend_Date::TIME_MEDIUM);
$newPost->createdAt = $today->get(Zend_Date::W3C);
$newPost->save();
 

Zend_Date::W3C returns a W3C compliant timestamp, which the Doctrine Model then passes to the underlying persistence layer.

Assuming that you had a UnitOfWork class handling your persistence, you could add createdAt to all of the YAML models, and have every record stamped with updatedAt and createdAt without changing any higher level code.

Why Bother With UpdatedAt and CreatedAt?

having these two columns in a table can save tremendous amounts of time sorting out concurrency issues. They also allow you to do some very primitive reporting on your data at no cost to adding complexity to the rest of your application.

My Doctrine Model was configured using a YAML file:

 
Post:
  tableName: post
  columns:
    id:
      primary: true
      autoincrement: true
      type: integer(4)
    createdAt: date
    title: string(255)
 

Then it's just a matter of running './doctrine rebuild-db' from the command line from the Doctrine directory and it create's the PHP classes and prepares the database columns.

Using Zend_Date, you can easily do date comparisons, generate different date formats, do complex date querying and so on without having to get into the string / number manipulations.

Tagged as: Doctrine, PHP, Zend, zend_date