Hello, I've been mailing some lists with this issue without any luck. I hope this is the right place to post this.
I was recently shocked when I discovered the implementation of Sybase "identical fields". The PHP manual for sybase_fetch_array() reads: <snip> Note: When selecting fields with identical names (for instance, in a join), the associative indices will have a sequential number prepended. See the example for details. </snip> I would like to say that I am against implementing these sort of repetitive field returns. If a programmer wants multiple (identically named) fields returned, they can always modify their SQL statement to reflect unique field names: select t1.id as id1, t2.id as id2 from t1,t2 PHP should NOT be mangling field names returned from the database driver, it should simply return the name-value of the LAST field of any given name. However, if this is to be kept in the code, there are a few important considerations that should be taken into account regarding the implementation: 1st. Upgading PHP. There are loads of cases where you can find in a database different tables with some identical field names. I know this is poor database design, but sometimes you find that you have to work with a design where this occurs. With this new feature on sybase_fetch_array() all the code where one just assumed that the returned value for field X was from the last table selected, MUST BE RE-WRITTEN. 2nd. IMHO, the implementation of this feature is very poor. When you have a JOIN over two tables and they have more that one field with the same name: table A: id date user afield table B: id date user bfield the resulting join will result in id date user id1 date2 user3 afield bfield A single numeric index is incremented for all repetitive fields, making it impossible to make it dynamic. (if you made a select using different fields you will get different field names!!!) I suggest correcting this implementation to return field names as follows: id date user id1 date1 user1 afield bfield One counter for each repeated field instead of one unique counter for ALL fields. 3rd. Last but not least... This is a feature only implemented in Sybase library functions, so when creating cross-db applications, it is much more difficult to implement generic code. I would appreciate hearing from the PHP Team about this. Thanks in advance, Alex ---------------------------- Alex Bazan abazan at filnet dot es
