Description
A Data Source is rather self explainitory by it's name alone; however, a
Data Source Driver in context to the DataGrid can become a very essential
key to your software. A Data Source Driver will interact with your data
source directly, such as a DB_DataObject or DB_Result object and handle
all of the paging and sorting code for you, resulting in very few lines
of code that you will need to write.
How to use the drivers
To use the drivers, you can simply use the bind method, assuming your
data source is listed below, otherwise you can use the
bindDataSource()
method. The
bind()
method will attempt to detect the datasource type and
may not be 100% accurate. Because of this chance for error, you may
choose to use the bindDataSource method where you can specifically define
the datasource driver to use. This method is also the method of choice
if you are building your own custom Data Source Driver.
Currently Available Data Source Drivers
The following listed drivers are currently packaged in with Structures_DataGrid.
PEAR::DB_DataObject Object
The DataObject is the most optimal data source for the datagrid because
it allows the datagrid to only fetch the necessary records upon
rendering. Please note that when binding to a dataobject, do not run
the fetch method prior since the datagrid will run the fetch method
during the rendering.
PEAR::DB_Result Object
When using the DB_Result object, please keep in mind that the sorting
will not be automatic and must be done in the SQL directly. Also the
paging will not be optimized since your entire result set will be
limitied. It is best to implement the LIMIT clause manually unless
your database platform does not support this.
XML File
XML can simply be presented via the DataGrid. You can bind the
Datagrid to a URL directly or via the contents of the XML file.
CSV File
A CSV file can simply be presented via the DataGrid. You can bind the
Datagrid to a URL directly or via the contents of the CSV file.
RSS File
An RSS feed can simply be presented via the DataGrid. You can bind the
Datagrid to a URL directly or via the contents of the RSS file.
Array
The core data type that the datagrid uses is an Array. The Datagrid
maintains it's data in a 2-dimension associative array. The array keys
are uses as the column names. This of couse can be changed by
specifying the columns directly.
