What is the main advantage of active records in codeigniter?

Question

In codeigniter PHP framework we can use normal SQL query and also we can use active record. Here i have understood active record syntax is less than normal SQL queries. Can any one tell me what is the main advantage of active record in codeigniter?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

The Active Record design pattern provides an easy way to handle the data (create/load, modify, update, delete) without the need to take care of the technical details.

Its main drawback is that it makes the unit testing impossible without using a database (which increases the test execution time a lot and breaks the isolation needed by the unit testing.)

Why the creators of CodeIgniter have chosen to use Active Record as their main way to implement the data persistence in the framework? I don't know.
Use it as it is or step forward and use another framework.

Answer 2

This is like comparing SQL with the ORM features because ACTIVE RECORD works as ORM in CI.

Here is the list of benefits of ORM:

1. Productivity: The data access code is usually a significant portion of a typical application, and the time needed to write that code can be a significant portion of the overall development schedule. When using an ORM tool, the amount of code is unlikely to be reduced—in fact, it might even go up—but the ORM tool generates 100% of the data access code automatically based on the data model you define, in mere moments.
2. Application design: A good ORM tool designed by very experienced software architects will implement effective design patterns that almost force you to use good programming practices in an application. This can help support a clean separation of concerns and independent development that allows parallel, simultaneous development of application layers.
3. Code Reuse: If you create a class library to generate a separate DLL for the ORM-generated data access code, you can easily reuse the data objects in a variety of applications. This way, each of the applications that use the class library need have no data access code at all.
4. Application Maintainability: All of the code generated by the ORM is presumably well-tested, so you usually don’t need to worry about testing it extensively. Obviously you need to make sure that the code does what you need, but a widely used ORM is likely to have code banged on by many developers at all skill levels. Over the long term, you can refactor the database schema or the model definition without affecting how the application uses the data objects.
5. You can change the backend database anything as you don't need to worry about query syntax as you are playing with OBJECTS instead of queries.

Answer 3

It definitely makes your code cleaner to read, and I only not use it when I have to do some seriously complex SQL stuff, like building multitable search queries. I recommend it for its code cleanliness highly.
It helps to prevent Sql Injection. But for some complex sql queries you can prefer your normal sql queries.