As a part of broadening my horizons, I’m back to working with Fuel, a framework that has a familiar feel to some of the ones I’ve used in the past but has some extra “oomf” from new features and PHP 5.3-ness.

I was working in my models the other day and had a need for uniqueness – I wanted to be sure that the object I was pushing into the database didn’t match any other one. I went through the docs and didn’t see anything about it and a glance through the source didn’t turn up anything either. So, as an alternative, I came up with a method I put in my base model:

[php]
class Model_Base extends OrmModel
{
public function isUnique($modelObject)
{
$modelType = get_class($modelObject);
$found = $modelType::find(‘all’,array(
‘where’ => $modelObject->to_array()
));
return (count($found)>0) ? false : true;
}
}
[/php]

The code above finds the class name (the model the object is made from) and tries to find anything with exactly the same properties. The “to_array()” method is something Fuel has to translate objects into handy arrays.

Fuel ORM docs