Associative arrays not working?

Thursday 07 August 2008 6:49:11 am

Hello,

yesterday I tried to extend the Collected information Export extension (http://projects.ez.no/cie) to export the ezoption datatype. In that course I discovered some strange behaviour where I could not reference an associative array as I thought I could.

class eZOptionHandler extends BaseHandler{
       function exportAttribute(&$attribute, $seperationChar) {
             echo $array['DataInt'];
             ...

that last statement never produced any output, whereas var_dump($attribute) shows:

object(ezinformationcollectionattribute)(10) {
  ["PersistentDataDirty"]=>
  bool(false)
  ["Content"]=>
  NULL
  ["ID"]=>
  string(5) "15178"
  ["InformationCollectionID"]=>
  string(5) "11191"
  ["ContentClassAttributeID"]=>
  string(4) "1005"
  ["ContentObjectAttributeID"]=>
  &string(6) "172424"
  ["ContentObjectID"]=>
  &string(5) "20112"
  ["DataText"]=>
  string(0) ""
  ["DataInt"]=>
  string(1) "3"
  ["DataFloat"]=>
  string(1) "0"
}

I have worked around that problem by iterating over the keys of the structure:

foreach ($attribute as $key => $value) {
      if ($key == 'DataInt') {
           $option_value = $value;
      }
}

I remember somewhere in the back of my mind to have read something about variables/datatypes getting "loaded" from the db only "on demand". Otherwise I have no idea what is going on here. Can anonye explain?

Thanks
Oliver

Thursday 07 August 2008 8:36:29 am

This is great, thanks.

Maybe you can also explain how I get the description of the options that are found in the content object instance belonging to the information collection? The only thing I could find was a text attribute filled with an XML fragment like this:

                // <ezoption>
                // <name>company_size</name>
                // <options>
                //    <option id="0"
                //           additional_price="0">0-10</option>
                //   <option id="1"
                //          additional_price="0">10-20</option>
                //     <option id="2"
                //          additional_price="0">20-30</option>
                //    <option id="3"
                //            additional_price="0">30-40</option>
                //   </options>
                // </ezoption>
                //

I was able to parse it but it is a bit cumbersome. I thought there was a way just looking the description up via an (associative) array?

Thanks
Oliver