When developing PHP web applications, Smarty is my template engine of choice. It is powerful, well supported and has a very neat syntax (or maybe I'm just too used to it to see its drawbacks, but this is another story).
What I wanted to share is that sometimes, what seems to be(or really is) a weakness of our tools can turn into virtue for our programming style/methodology. Here, in brief, is the story.
I love the way you can manage arrays in PHP, it's so easy that you find yourself almost involuntarily using them for every task. This can too easily turn into addiction; soon you are building multidimensional arrays even when not requested, and here is the trap. At a certain point you realize you're a multidimensional arrays maniac. This is exactly what happened to me when I found out I was managing an array like the following:
$products[$product_id']['categories']['assigned'][$assigned_category_id]
What I wanted to achieve on my presentation layer was to have a products table with a nested assigned categories table for each product. Seemed easy enough, but it wasn't. Though, as I wrote, Smarty is my favourite template engine, I cannot assert I'm a Smarty guru, so after half an hour of attempts I came out with some more or less working template snippet that, for decency, I'm not going to publish here. Now let's ignore that an expert (at least more expert than me) Smarty user would have solved it easily, what I realized in the end is that maybe my approach to data shaping was not correct. I tried to compare the situation to typical database approaches. More than probably, I thought, if using a db engine I would have created two tables, one with the products and one with assigned categories bound to a specific product (being the product_id the foreign key).
I tried to follow that pattern, split my array in two, and after 3 minutes I had a perfectly working template without the need for tricks on Smarty.
Does this mean my data model was unnecessarily complicated? I don't know, and would gratefully appreciate others' opinions, but I suspect I've learnt a lesson.......
