Data Mapper pattern implementation with zend

Question

I am implementing data mapper in my zend framework 1.12 project and its working fine as expected. Now further more to enhance it i wants to optimize it in following way.

While fetching any data what id i wants to fetch any 3 field data out of 10 fields in my model table? - The current issue is if i fetches the only required values then other valus in domain object class remains blank and while saving that data i am saving while model object not a single field value.

Can any one suggest the efficient way of doing this so that i can fetch/update only required values and no need to fetch all field data to update the record.

Answer 1

If property is NULL ignore it when crafting the update? If NULLs are valid values, then I think you would need to track loaded/dirty states per property.

How do you go about white-listing the fields to retrieve when making the call to the mapper? If you can persist that information I think it would make sense to leverage that knowledge when going to craft the update.

I don't typically go down this path. I will lazy load certain fields on a model when it makes sense, but I don't allow loading parts of the object like this, rather I create an alternate object for use in rendering a list when loading the full object is too resource intensive. A generic dummy list object I just use with tabular data. It being populated from SQL or stored procedures result-sets, usually with my generic table mapper.